I learned how to weld (MIG) and built a giant mushroom to house a mannequin I dubbed "the mushroom man" over about 100 hours in the last 4 weeks. I covered the outside with thick foam panels cut to size, cementing them in place with copious amounts of spray foam. I shaved the outside to a nice shape with a sawzall and the inside I covered in chicken-fenced, then attached a painters tarp to that (so it could be painted on).
To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.
Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.
MIG is really just a glue gun for metal. For things where structural integrity isn’t critical you MIG stuff together by watching a couple YouTube videos and then going at it.
What I appreciated about metal shop class is the casual (software-like?) attitude towards toolmaking. Would that step go better with a jig? Weld one up on your workbench, and then angle grind everything off when you move to the next phase...
I was using my dad's shop and MIG welder, so he was able to give me an intro. A buddy of mine is a millwright and came over and kindly taught me some tricks which brought me welds up to an acceptable quality.
After learning, I'd have to agree with one of the other responses, learning by Youtube is probably feasible. It's safer than I expected (less concern about touching metal in the ground path) though I'd strongly recommend investing in quality gloves, a quality helmet, and good thick pants, and a long-sleeved shirt / overcoat.
I thought about taking a course but I found this way of learning a lot more fun and engaging (if you're fortunate, as I am, to have experienced people in your life).
I spent a week building a website that is a repository of timeless content. It generally consists of old magazine articles (though not exclusively) that you can pick up at any time and will bring value to your life. I notice most of what we consume on daily basis is ephemeral and not all that valuable outside of the moment, whereas ever-present content is always valuable.
The unique angle here is that each article includes a hand-written summary explaining why the article was meaningful to the curator. This gives you a quick window into the piece without being overwhelming.
Since this is a free website mostly to be shared with friends and family, I implemented user login via "phone number" to save and submit articles, but without a one-time token. So it's "password-less" for now; a trust-based system.
It's basically 'done' - but I'm not sure that I want to share it publicly for the aforementioned reasons. I've been using it on my subway rides to read more interesting stuff. So far so good.
From that I’m guessing you don’t want to open it to random HN folk, but if you ever do, it sounds a great resource and something I’d love to participate in.
I got so upset with Docusign being too expensive and unfair, that I quit my last startup to build a new one.
I built a complete platform over the past 3 years, that doesn't require a subscription and you only pay for what you send. Give it a go if you need to send a document that needs to be signed.
Really good job! Just a note your pricing comparison table looks a bit shady. I think you should give either your per year cost compared to the others, or put the document cost on the others. But the way you've done it makes it look like you are tricking people into thinking yours is cheaper. That's just the vibe I'm getting from it. I think that's what you want the takeaway to be there, so I'd suggest updating that slightly.
The others don't do a document cost, so it does make it much harder to compare.
The others just have a document limit, eg Docusign has a 100 document limit per user.
Docusign has a really high cost per user (I don't charge for users, only for sends).
So it is harder to compare apples with apples – at the end of the day GoodSign is just that simple. $1.50 per send, unlimited users : )
I choose 6 – because that's about the typical team size I see with GoodSign. So that feels like a good comparison.
Thanks for pointing the pricing out - it really is that terrible! Hence why I built a product I would buy and I could understand. : )
I'd agree with @idk1, the pricing comparison is, basically, unusable.
Goodsign compares to Docusign at $45/mo * 6 users for $3,240/year, compared to $1.50 for Goodsign. Hard to imagine a team of 6 that send one document per year.
If I go to Docusign, they list a $15/mo price (Monthly) per user for 5 documents. Or a price of $3/envelope, which compares favorably to Goodsign. The $45/mo price seems to be for unlimited documents, so that'd be a breakeven of 30 documents per user per month. BUT, Docusign offers significant discounts for paying yearly (hard to imagine a team of 6 that would use a service for just a month), which adjusts the pricing to $2/document for the 5 document plan and breakeven of 17 documents on the unlimited plan.
I went to the pricing page to try to get an idea of whether I should suggest my company look at switching to Goodsign, and the page didn't help at all. The pricing page suggests that we're spending around a quarter million dollars a month on Docusign, which I know isn't the case, but without knowing how many documents we send for signing, which I don't know even an order of magnitude off hand, I can't get any idea what sort of ballpark we'd be looking at.
It might be worth having a price estimate comparison calculator instead of just a table. E.g., enter the number of users, the number of docs per week/month to show estimated price.
That may well be the case, but I think you need to have a look at the design of this pricing grid as it is confusing or not helpful or misleading.
Perhaps some sort of slider where you can work out how yours compares to the amount of documents per month, so start with a sensible default and then show how much other services cost versus yours with, for example, 100 documents per month.
Fair comment – haven't tried to mislead anyone on the pricing. But I'll work to make it much clearer as I haven't put enough effort in the bottom row which shows a more fairer price comparison.
I'm using safari all the time.
Gah yes - appreciate the screenshots. I'll get that sorted tonight, I've recently rolled those two section out and missed checking it for mobile. Doh...
The joys of solo development.
FYI, all browsers on iOS are still using WebKit for rendering. While Apple has released the browser building APIs, no vendor has managed to port a new engine yet. You didn’t specify the OS so I figured I’d mention it.
On android, browser engines are actually unique and not just fancy webview wrappers.
I have been looking for something like this, but the pricing is too high for my use case. It needs to be comparable to just printing the document and signing with pens, or it's not generally worth it to me. It seems wild to me that something that in principal could be basically free costs so much.
One could make the argument that the time, effort and coordination that it takes to go to the library and also coordinate a counter signature is more expensive than the cost per envelope.
Preview works great for one people signing. Not so helpful for people sending.
GoodSign helps businesses to make sure that when the send a contract it does get signed and they don't forget about it (GoodSign keeps reminding you to sign).
It allows two different people to sign at the same time and it doesn't matter what order. The document is saved forever, securely so you don't lose it.
Well, yeah he forgot to mention Mail app (also runs on Mac) where you just click on Gray/Blue star "Sign" - and it's signed. But that's only the message right? Well - you should sign PDF before as well. Then - it's done. Don't get us wrong - I don't even check your project - which definitely deserve to exists - just saying - maybe it's not for everyone...
This is nice, but I think it would be even better if you had some sort of unlimited plan or volume price (I see the $1k offer but that still is pretty high). A person conducting a survey with NDAs with 150 would find this useful, but if i am regularly conducting surveys with at least 1k people who have to sign NDAs, your pricing model becomes unfavorable.
Appreciate the feedback - you probably could do something much simpler for NDA. I don't really think you need a signature, a check box would be good enough in your survey saying they've agreed to your NDA.
GoodSign works really well for multiple signers, employment contracts and small to medium startups that are want a better signing tool and document management - but don't feel like the high prices of other tools is justified.
The folks from Agree.com just started up to do the same thing... what do you think of them? Sounds like one of those times when folks think the same thing at the same time?
my wife and I have a new side project: we're opening a bookshop! the last local store is closing due to retirement and we figure the community demand is still there. we're negotiating the lease, sorting out how to order a lot of bookshelves, and source the initial inventory. i'm currently figuring out how to connect our point of sale system to our accounting software. good times. :)
I hope you succeed. This would be a dream of mine, have a cozy bookshop, with maybe a cafe, or something like that. The world deserves more bookstores, they are beautiful and each one is unique. Honestly, I wish you the best and, as someone who would love to live it through but possibly won't, I'd love if you start a weekly newsletter telling what you are doing/learning in the process!
yeah, it was the same for us. really one day we woke up, talked about it, and agreed, why not. worst case, i'll work a few more years than i had originally planned or whatever. best cast, we have delivered a valuable service to the community and can work on it for many years. my wife will be full time and it's very much her dream too. i hadn't thought of the newsletter but that's such a good idea...stay tuned, i might dm you.
I'm pretty sure that the owners of Belmont Books in Belmont, MA also opened their store out of a love of bookstores & the community surrounding it. Best of luck to you!
https://www.belmontbooks.com/ (no affiliation)
Even if you can’t have a full service cafe, having a commercial coffee brewer (do they make tea ones?) could add that extra oomph. I like nothing more than sitting at a table and perusing my new book while sipping on some hot coffee or tea.
What accounting is it and what POS?
Cuz for $15/m I have one that connects with Quickbooks online and xero natively.
Would be more than enough for a bookstore / coffee.
It’s well know and used all over the world.
That's lovely. I'm still in university, but one thing I've wanted to do since I was a kid is to have a small bookshop or library later in life. Thanks for showing me it can be done!
I've heard that IKEA "Billy" bookshelves are very popular, including among people who heavily customize them into creations that look nothing like the original.
That does seem like it would be the easiest route, but it seems that if that were an option, the OP probably would have done it already. I wonder if it wasn't an option for some reason.
yeah it wasn't an option for a variety of reasons. for instance, landlord of the prior location will subdividing and reletting the space and that work will take time to complete. another consideration is remaining inventory tends to be the stuff that doesn't sell well anyway and even at a steep discount that inventory occupies valuable shelf space.
Ah, my wife and I have always wanted to do the same. We would like to make it a bookshop for dog charity. Hope we get there some day as well. Keep up the good work!
we have a really great local library system where i live so what we're working on is definitely more a local store. we'll have a mix of titles based on our knowledge of community preferences (my wife is also a writer and knows much more than me about the local scene), seasonal titles (e.g. featuring new and old horror titles in october), plus events like author readings and educational seminars.
at full retail price, you're often looking at 40-50% for books...but then everything goes on sale at some point. sideline merch (think the stuffed animals in the kids section) can get 60%+. but after rent, expenses, etc. we're just hoping to break even in year 1. the math suggests its possible but we're about to find out empirically. in the end, most evidence also suggests there are a lot easier ways to make $30k net a year. but it's a community project as a much as a business.
more power to you finding something you love and providing so lovingly to the community, money be damned, it's all the other things that truly matter!
my wife and I when visiting a new place specifically seek out the local bookshop and buy something, her heading into the nonfiction section and me into fantasy/scifi. always a pleasure.
yes exactly, my wife and i are the same way. some of the other shops we talked to were surprised at the amount of foot traffic from people who for one reason or another just happened to be in the area. anyway, we will have a full 8x13' room for scifi/fantasy; that's my section too...we could probably use more space for that. :)
yup...it's razor thin. the ones that we found doing well are very, very good at community engagement in events and partnerships with local schools, community colleges, etc.
It's essentially a simpler, read-only, AWS dashboard where everything is a filterable, searchable, exportable-to-CSV table, with some extra features like multi-region mode, saved notes, and a debugger for access denied errors.
It uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript, so everything is run client-side from your browser. I'm not 100% sure what direction I'm taking it yet, but it's been fun to hack on!
Thankfully programmatic. It’s a common UI table widget, essentially, and I’ve written some custom code to handle multi-region support, updating the AWS credential handler, pagination, and response processing. From there, it’s a matter of plugging in some common options for each AWS service: the service name, SDK method to call, pagination property (annoyingly, AWS API has numerous ways of paginating responses), etc. Takes about five minutes to add a new service.
I'm using ag-grid for my project too. I did a bunch of work to make configuring it more declarative... so you can have pinned rows that read from a different data source for summary stats, so you can specify custom renderers for each column. how have you found ag-grid to use?
Oh, that's neat! I've found it to be really flexible, although some of the really nice features are (understandably) locked behind the expensive "Pro" version (like right-click context menus, etc.). Will check out your examples!
Building algorithmic trading models. So far results continue to be good with every model outperforming the market on both absolute and risk-adjusted basis since going live.
This is an unleveraged, apples to apples comparison. These are not high frequency trading models. Most of them only change signal once every 2-4 weeks on average. During long signals, the models are simply long the S&P 500 and during short signals, they go to cash.
One of the pros of this macro swing-trading/hedging style is high tax efficiency, by holding a core ETF long position that never gets sold and then selling S&P 500 futures (ES or MES) of equal value to the ETFs against the long position. This way your account will accumulate unrealized capital gains indefinitely and you'll only pay tax on the net result of successful hedging. The cherry on top is that the S&P 500 futures are section 1256 contracts that are taxed at 60% long term / 40% short term capital gains rates regardless of the duration they are held.
The models use a variety of indicators, many of them custom built. Most important are various VIX metrics (absolute level, VIX futures curve shape/slope, divergences against S&P 500 price, etc), trend-following TA metrics (MACD, EMV, etc), mean-reversion TA metrics (Bollinger Bands, CMO, etc), macroeconomic (unemployment, housing starts, leading composite), and monetary policy (yield curve inversion, equity risk premium, dot plot, etc). They've been backtested very cautiously to avoid overfitting to the best of my ability.
I've been curious about doing algotrading for both the data engineering aspect and the quant. Do you have suggestions about books or others sources to get inspiration from ?
Is this a one man venture or do you have a group discussing edges ?
For inspiration, I highly recommend "The Man Who Solved the Market" about James Simons and Renaissance Technologies. Some of Ernie Chan's books are great for learning about the basics, but ultimately finding an edge is the most difficult part. Books can teach you some of the best practices for researching edges, how to avoid common pitfalls in backtesting, etc, but no book will ever lay out the details of any strategy that contains alpha of course.
Grizzly Bulls is currently a one man (and wife) venture :)
I've looked before for good online communities but never found one, I'd be interested if anyone has a source. The best people work for hedge funds so wont disclose anything and the individuals out there mostly are clueless or lucky, I suspect its too hard to find an edge without the resources of a large firm.
I expect the long term CAGR for the top models to be in the 20-40% annual range. That's certainly high enough to get wealthy over a couple decades, or sooner if you are already starting with 8 figures, but it's not overnight Roaring Kitty style fast money. Grizzly Bulls' growing revenue helps even out my overall income, and I could definitely see it growing to $10M+ ARR over the long term, very significant even with a 9 figure net worth.
The models are not HFT. Swing-trading the most liquid instrument in the world (ES futures) has extremely high strategy capacity, well into the billions or perhaps 10s of billions, so selling signals does not (currently) in any way negatively impact my own returns.
The alternative would be to start a hedge fund, but that's an expensive and highly regulated endeavor that appeals to a different audience.
could this have any legal risks, e.g. your clients will sue you for manipulations and causing losses to them? Is this a valid business at all from SEC standpoint?
We have the standard disclaimers in the TOS. Essentially, Grizzly Bulls is not a financial advisor, offers no financial advice, and only sells access to signals generated by proprietary models, not the underlying source code for the models. How subscribers choose to use those signals is entirely at their own discretion. There are hundreds of similar businesses out there, and really signals are no different than buy/sell ratings published by more mainstream sites like Seeking Alpha or Morningstar.
All that said, subscribers have generally been happy with Grizzly Bulls' service as evidenced by our low churn rate, especially for the higher tiers.
How would I even go about starting investing using this? Let's say I have a trading212 account or similar? Where do you even start? Do you have a "how to get started page" assuming someone knows little about investing.
https://grizzlybulls.com/how-it-works is the best page I have explaining the basics, but I probably need to be more accommodating to complete beginners. Grizzly Bulls is intended to be a great complement to the buy and hold passive indexing strategy that most people use.
The easiest way to use Grizzly Bulls is to hold VOO in any brokerage account, sell it when the model generates a sell signal, and then rebuy it when the model generates the next buy signal. A slightly more advanced but more tax efficient approach would be to open a margin account with futures trading permissions and sell S&P 500 Futures (ES or MES) of equal value to your VOO during sell signals, then repurchase the contracts you sold during the next buy signal. With this method, I've found you can usually reduce your overall tax burden to less than 15% and you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your futures trading.
Sorry for the total newbie question here -- I'm familiar with options and have traded them a little bit (though that was a long time ago). I've never traded futures before. With your "more advanced" approach, can you help me wrap my head around what the possible outcomes are of buying/selling the futures contracts? What is the impact to me if I, for example, hold $100k of VOO in my brokerage account, sell futures amounting to $100k total on a sell signal, and then I'm "called" (sorry, don't know what the correct term here is) on my futures? Am I wrong in thinking that I'd be required to cough up $100k or my VOO shares?
Good question - you won't be "called" or anything like that in this scenario as you are effectively market neutral. If VOO goes up, your ES/MES futures value will go down accordingly and your account's net liquidation value will remain unchanged and well above your maintenance margin figure.
The only way to really drop below your maintenance margin is if you are either leveraged long (i.e. more than 100% long) or short (i.e. less than 0% long), and the market moves significantly against you. In that scenario, your broker will automatically start liquidating some of your positions.
That makes sense from the perspective of my brokerage/margin account, thanks! I guess I was also curious about the futures themselves; since they’re a contract to buy/sell just like options, would I ever be required to take an action, assuming I’m holding the futures contract at expiration?
Oh no, you are never required to take an action with equity index futures as they are cash settled every quarter. So whether you have an open long or short position at expiration time, it will automatically disappear from your account with your balance left exactly as it should based on the settlement price.
However, this does mean that you'd need to open an equivalent position in the next quarter's contract to maintain your hedge, if one was open, at expiration time which is regular trading hours opening time on the third Friday of expiration month.
Ofc, but as far as I understand algotrading, you don’t need to move a market for other bots to abuse your scheme eventually. Works on real non-toy money since 2022 and works on your napkin simulation since 2022 is a huge difference.
Depending on the market, that threshold can be crazy low. Many smaller brokers make most of their profit by playing against their "customers". Small players can't use the big brokers, and even if they become big players, this just attracts other big players to use their bots against them.
It's a dark forest out there.
Source: I knew several people starting out with a few hundred thousand, "doing really well", and then soon as they crossed some magic number like one million dollars they suddenly started getting front-run on every trade until they gave up. Two of them spent years trying to "fix" their algorithm until they finally figured out what was happening to them.
This basically confirms my concern. It’s known that algo doesn’t live long on sensible amounts. It’s a never-ending churn between bots who don’t even take you personally. It’s as simple as the N+1 guy learning (ml or human ideas) on the whole market that N is a part of and stealing profits from all n <= N by design.
If OP managed to run it live since 2022, I’d be very surprised and glad for them. If not, condolences for the time lost on napkin profitability.
I use Interactive Brokers for automated trade execution and as data source for real-time ES and VIX data. Data for the other indicators comes from a wide variety of sources. One of my favorites is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/.
Not yet, but I plan to write a revised edition incorporating some of the feedback I've gotten in the near future. I'll include a digital version with it.
Yes, in fact non-bull regimes are where they earn most of their relative outperformance. During buy signals, it's impossible for the models to outperform as they are long the S&P 500. During sell signals, they are in cash with the hopes of rebuying lower (doesn't always work out as they are of course imperfect). When the market is rising with low volatility, there aren't as many opportunities for outperformance.
Yes, but that's why the preferred method of implementation is using the S&P 500 futures (ES and MES) as the hedging tool during sell signals. With this method, you hold your preferred ETFs/stocks of choice forever and continue to accumulate unrealized gains indefinitely. Then on sell signals, you sell ES and MES of equivalent value to your long holdings to effectively go market neutral.
At the end of each year, you'll only owe taxes on the net result of your hedging with futures, and futures are section 1256 contracts so they are taxed as 60% long term gains / 40% short term gains regardless of holding period. In practice, I've found that this usually works out to an effective capital gains tax of less than 15% of annual profits. If a strategy returns a gross 30%, then the after-tax return would be about 25.5%.
Also, if you implement in a retirement account which many of our members do, capital gains are irrelevant.
You have a point, but it still makes sense to report before tax performance. Before tax performance depends on model only, but after tax performance depends on model and the user. this website couldn't report that even if it wanted.
I've been trying to work on things that aren't necessarily economically valuable but that are on my mind and I want to share.
For example, a carbon footprint calculator that pokes fun at the idea of the individual being to blame for climate change. https://a.mancato.nl/climate-calculator
And after seeing my dad struggle to find stuff online because he was seeing so many ads, I made an adblocker ad. https://a.mancato.nl/adblock
Fun calculator. A little noisy to make its points, but "You could die right now and Shell could continue operating for 6 seconds longer with the carbon you saved" is a powerful statement.
I wasted so much energy in my most vigorous years trying to make decisions that literally don't matter at all and felt so important. I could have been building skills to influence policy instead, but the sustainability movement was bamboozled pretty hard.
Thank you for the feedback. I'm still looking for the right tone and length since I want it to be factual and understandable yet also as concise as possible. I'll have another look to see if I can improve it.
Makes me think of adding a big quote + Tweet this element to the page. E.g:
"I could die right now and Shell could continue operating for 6 seconds longer with the carbon I saved"
I'm working on https://nuenki.app/, a language learning tool. It teaches you a language while you procrastinate by inserting translations of appropriate-difficulty sentences into webpages as you browse HN etc.
Currently trying to reduce costs by switching from using DeepL (high quality, low latency, high cost) everywhere to a hybrid that also uses Claude (high quality, high latency, low cost) for text that is far from the user. Also experimenting with Gemma 2 9B via Groq to go in between them, but it's bad at following instructions and I don't quite trust the quality numbers I'm seeing for it (they're benchmarked with gpt-4o as a judge).
I'm also trying to work out marketing. I'm not good at it, and I dislike it, but I need to get good at it. Currently considering Reddit ads for awareness, some content marketing going over the technical details (there's some fun language processing and performance optimisations), and... I feel that's not enough, but I'm not sure what to add to that.
I'm running on very little budget (I just left school and I'd rather not go into my limited savings over this), so I can't afford to just throw money at ads.
Toucan has a similar concept, but it works on individual words rather than sentences. Beyond a smaller scope, it's also quite difficult to accurately translate single words without context - Nuenki has it disabled by default.
The tradeoff is that Toucan is free, and translation is quite expensive.
Would be really useful to have some way to hear the translated sentences so that you can also learn how it's supposed to be said - would be very useful for learning Japanese.
Some feedback: I was about to try now (paying) but currently I can only install it in my desktop (no iOS support), and I am very worried about the idea of giving full access to a close-source unpopular extension with not-very-clear ownership.
I think it would go a long way to create some trust to show who are you in the webpage and maybe open source the extension too (the backend is not as importa nt).
I'm considering open sourcing the extension. I don't want people to be able to copy it wholesale, but realistically that's unlikely and I'm going to write some blog posts on the technical details anyway.
Please do! i would love to contribute, ive been looking for something like this for some time but didnt want to install toucan since its closed-source and i dont trust it
awesome! i am also exploring “low effort language learning” space and making an app. would be interested in bouncing some ideas, got a social handle to share?
looks cool,it would be useful to have transliterations for non latin alphabet languages,or at least pinyin for Chinese, since learning characters is somewhat orthogonal to the words.
I'm also learning Chinese, and I honestly wouldn't care for Pinyin all that much. (Once you get to an intermediate level of Chinese, you'll want to learn characters anyway, because that's how Chinese is written in the real world.) That said, a hover option to transliterate and translate individual words (instead of the whole sentence at once) would be great.
For a more practical complaint, in the Nuenki browser extension, the settings window has a primary-colored (green) button in the bottom right that says "Log out", but has no "Save" button. I almost clicked "Log out" when I just meant to confirm the settings I had made!
Edit: Also one question, if I may - how large is the context window for the translations? I noticed that the Chinese it generates sometimes feels a little unidiomatic, but I'm not sure whether that's due to too little context, the fault of the translation engine(s) used, or just my feeling as a non-advanced Chinese learner being off.
Edit 2: Some of the translations are definitely just wrong, too. Again, might be the fault of the engines - after all, machine translation, even in the age of LLM, is not perfect.
I can't really translate individual words (translation is done on a sentence-by-sentence basis, so I don't have that data), but I could do transliteration. Perhaps hovering could transliterate, clicking could translate the whole sentence, and clicking again could reset it. It's difficult balancing the amount of things people want to do with the text (listen to audio, translate the word, translate the sentence, and transliterate the word) with how few input methods there are + text shifting.
The context window is only that sentence. It would be technically possible to increase the context window, but it would make it impossible to cache and increase translation costs even without that. Unfortunately the development of Nuenki has been defined by mitigating the cost of translation - before I had my many mitigations my prototype burned through six euros of credit in a day - so it's not practical to expand that context window.
I'll definitely recolour that button. Thanks for mentioning it!
The incorrect translations are the engine's fault. The version you're using uses https://www.deepl.com/en/whydeepl . Looking at my quality data for the new update (which adds Claude and Gemma as translation sources in some circumstances), that'll improve a little soon but ultimately not by much.
Building a web app that lets me do math and chemistry problems on an infinite canvas with a drawing tablet. After finishing the problem, I can open up an integrated text editor (with vim bindings) that lets me create Anki flashcards about the problem, letting me copy different portions of the handwritten/hand-drawn stuff onto the flashcard.
I developed a very simple compiler to specify flashcard content. Anything inside brackets is considered the "back" of the flashcard (cloze) in Anki. The @n references the nth group in the canvas, and copies those svg paths into the flashcard.
Example card:
How do you solve for x in this problem?
@0 // handwritten text of 2x = 4
[
Divide both sides by 2, them simplify
]
This project was a response to the lack of systematic review in my college's STEM classes. I would practice a lot, but forget how to approach certain problems on exams. The hope is to have a digital space where I can be reasonably productive in solving practice problems, but also lets me easily integrate with SRS tools.
I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Nice. SRS integration is my ultimate yak-shave when learning something new.
> I wish educators and educational institutions would make an attempt to incorporate SRS into classes. I think it would help a lot of students, especially for cumulative final exams.
Some of us try to. But when teaching middle-high school aged children the problem is almost always one of motivation and engagement rather than tooling and methodology.
You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Worst case scenario you try to enforce SRS activities and some students develop an aversion to an incredibly powerful tool.
My sweet spot was something like "here is an app called Anki, here is a deck of content we will cover in this class (tagged by week), try it out and see if its useful for you". Even then I was slightly conflicted because I've always wondered how much of the utility I've gotten from SRS came from sitting down and making the decks myself...
I'm going to be a dad next year, so I've been thinking about how to baby-proof areas of my house while allowing my cat freedom of navigation.
My wife is an English teacher, so I've been building little educational games for her to try in the classroom. My latest attempt is a proof-reading game https://frogs.cool Currently I'm using wikipedia articles but I'm working on adding a variety of age appropriate texts in different genres.
FWIW, most baby proofing you can do after month 12, after some minimal baby proofing at 6 months (depending on kid and space). They truly can’t get into much trouble before 4-5 months. Much of what I worried about prepping for was far easier to do once you actually have the issue at your feet but you have time.
On the topic of cat freedom... I had the opposite problem. A few years ago, for a while I had to separate our two cats so they wouldn't fight while we weren't home (long story, but we couldn't let them fight each other like most cats will do for fun, due to some medical reasons).
It was basically impossible. I wanted to set it up so one cat could be downstairs, and the other upstairs, so one wouldn't feel like they were being "punished", by being closed in a bedroom and only having that small area to roam in.
I built a "gate" for the top of our stairwell, the height of the railing, out of carboard and some pet-safe window screen material. First one of the cats managed to wriggle under it, so I reinforced it and gave it a "skirt". Then the other cat climbed up the screen mesh, and I found her just sitting there, perched on top of it.
Eventually I managed to make it sturdy enough. But then one of the cats realized he could jump over it.
I mostly gave up after that, and focused on training him not to fight with his little sister.
So this is a long winded way of saying: your cat might not really be bothered by things like baby gates. Might actually view them as a fun challenge to be (fairly easily) overcome. Unless of course your cat is older and/or has mobility issues.
Yeah, my cat is getting older and a total wimp at jumping over things. So I will have to figure out a way. Of course this is all an excuse to build an elaborate ramp or tunnel system.
On preventing cats from climbing things, apparently attaching a rolling bar at the top is very effective: https://catrollers.com
As a father with two cats, there are only really two things that have been an issue: food and litter trays. We solved both by putting them into commode-type things (the litter trays were more complex than the food, we had them made specially with a labyrinth entrance to stop an arm snaking through and picking stuff out).
Maintaining a database of Canadian grocery prices. (Reach out to me if you're passionate about rising food prices and/or have economic analysis skills!)
Writing articles about & archiving Victorian-era "Artistic Printing" - like the examples at [2]. (Reach out if you're knowledgeable about letterpress printing, brass rule art etc. and want to share your insights)
I am working on Buckaroo[1] - the data table for jupyter/dataframes that I have always wanted. Buckaroo combines a performant table capable of scrolling through 1000s of rows, with summary stats and histograms. All configurable and extensible by users. never type df.head() again. give it a try, I'm eager to hear feedback.
Recently I have been working on the low-code UI. I find myself looking up and typing the same pandas (and polars) incantations over and over again to explore and modify data. The low-code UI allows simple transforms of data (search, remove column outliers, show only outliers of a column, group by) to be perfromed with just clicks. You can also view the generated python code. This is powered by a json-flavored lisp interpreter, but users never have to type lisp code.
Official data sharing practices are poor - results are are often in the wrong format or not available at all. I had to be quite resourceful to put this all together. As I transition out of academia I hope this sort of data helps others do interesting work.
I designed an electronic board game, very similar to Settlers of Catan.
There are some electronic Catan builds out there, but I found them really expensive -- e.g. opting for a smartwatch screen + microcontroller for every game tile (of which there are 19). Beautiful, yes -- but not my style.
Instead, I went for 8-segment displays for numeric tile values, and RGB LEDs to display terrain types. It adds up to 342 LEDs to control for the full board, from a single central microcontroller. When you turn it on, it sets up the board for you. Pressing a central button "rolls the dice", and it will flash the tiles that produce resources as per the game rules. Or cue special actions on certain rolls.
I really enjoy cost-optimizing prototypes, so this was good fun. I got it down to about USD 20 for a single, ready-to-play unit, including solid brass game pieces (it helps that I'm in Asia). I still use the deck of cards from Catan for now, but plan to replace it with something sci-fi themed. Maybe "Asteroid Miners".
The only thing I'm not 100% satisfied with is that the board is a little cramped -- it's a bit over half the size of the original Catan board. The PCBs had to fit within 100mx100mm -- I used a bit of a weird PCB geometry so that the board is composed of 3 identical subunits, rotated a few degrees to maximize it's surface area within a 100mm square.
I'm not planning to sell it. I just had a slow month, so it's a good time to learn to do new things. I never make any money with hardware, but I love how whimsical electronics can brighten someone's day. Sometimes that earns me a client -- and if not, it's cheap entertainment for me that keeps my skills sharp and my morale high.
I built an English-speaking website that helps immigrants settle in Berlin.[0] It has been my full time job for a while. Most English speakers know about it, but it's nearly invisible to Germans, who would also benefit from the content and tools I have worked on.
I'm currently adding an automated AI translation feature to my custom static site generator, so that I can translate the website to multiple languages and reach more people. I'm trying to make the process as seamless and automated as possible, because I'm running this website solo, and there are only so many hours in a day.
It's a surprisingly tricky endeavour! As usual, the first 80% are easy. It's getting the last 20% right that requires a lot of work. There are so many small hurdles. For instance, translating the URL structure and translating the URLs within the content, getting the translations to be accurate, getting the SEO right, translating the templates and the JS tools I've built, keeping the costs low.
I recently moved to Germany (not to Berlin, but seems like most of the content is still relevant) and your website was extremely helpful - thank you for working on it.
Thank you for building this! I’ve discovered it a while ago and has been showing it as an example of what a good government website should look like. It’s a joy to read and explore, even though I’m not considering moving to Berlin :-)
Any suggestions to anybody starting another website like this?
- Only add things that improve upon Reader View. A table of contents, better typography, and that's about it.
- Get to the point. I put a lot of effort into writing succinctly and unambiguously. I revise my content time and time again to get it just right. Information architecture is also important.
- Sweat the small stuff. Reduce friction for your users wherever you can. Something as simple as a letter template makes a big difference for readers that dread communicating in German.
I've been doing this for seven years, so I picked up quite a few tricks along the way. It all comes down to knowing my users, and working hard to reduce their pain.
Super awesome work btw, I was looking to move to Germany and my mind was blown with the weird notary monopoly when it comes to starting a business. I couldn't believe that is how it worked...
This is great! You mentioned this is your full time project. How do you make a living off it? I see mention of affiliate links and a call for donations. Is that how you monetize the site?
One of the first things I read on the site was about the "church tax"[0]. Very interesting.
> You declare your religion when you register your address. The church can also tax you if you were a member in another country. To stop paying the church tax, you must leave the church.
Hi! This website is for me! I moved to Berlin about a week ago, and am staying for some months.
Fortunately, I have a native friend who has been explaining everything so far, but this is an amazing bridge so I won't have to ask a billion questions. (And this is written from an outsiders perspective, so basically no knowledge is assumed). I'm looking forward to reading it all
(on an unrelated note): I tried to move to Berlin for summer but quickly discovered almost no apartments have AC, I mean strong South Asia-level AC.
It was a major no for me as I cannot sleep with temp above 20C, 18C is perfect.
Any idea how to find an AC apartment next summer on local estate apps? Any "checkbox" somewhere to tick?
A hotel is temporary, i wanted to stay May to September.. Yes mobile AC is the best plausible option but it's quite weak compared to split-AC and requires a partially open window.
There are mobile split-AC. I took one meant for camping. And the wiring between the units is small enough, so that an opened window is not a problem. Worked well enough for me.
This is wonderful, though I wouldnt want to move to Berlin I find this really useful to learn about Germany. I also find it funny because it epitomises how broken the EU is. It should not be this hard to move within the EU, alas, here we are. Thank you for putting this together for the folks that need it!
That is an entirely wrong takeaway. Mobility is much easier for EU citizens. They skip all the hardest part of the process, the ones that actually make people leave out of frustration or bureaucratic blockade. The problem firmly sits in German hands.
7 years. The translation workflow will become surprisingly complex. Making it simple again will take some time. Usually ai mostly automate something, then let it run for a while before finishing the job. You don’t know how you will work with a tool until you do.
I'm working on my hobby operating system written in Rust. It is completely text-based, but the console was lacking a scrollback buffer until this week. It's a simple feature, really, but having to redirect anything that outputs more than one screen to a file to read it was a pain. I'm happy to finally have it!
This weekend, I also made good progress on user-space memory and found a workaround for some issues I had. I still need to implement it the right way, though. After a few years on the project, the thing that is giving me the most trouble is grokking the concept of page tables.
When I was a child, my best friend and I were dreaming of making our own game. We got as far as writing (parts of) the story for a Lucasfilm Games-style point and click adventure, but my programming skills as a young teenager were too poor to actually make that game.
That idea has actually never left my mind though, and now, a few decades later, I've started to realize that if I don't get on it soon, I probably never will.
So I've started writing a game for the Commodore C64, 30 years after they stopped making them, and that's what I've been working on lately.
I too have ideas from back in the days and with LLMs it's easy to get started. Previously the activation energy was high but with LLMs you get the basic scaffold in place and then take it from there. Is your friend also working on it? Don't give up, ideas like this are like fine wines, am sure you brain has been running a background process on this idea.
I have an old tigsource account that in theory I could reactivate... But for now, I'm still in the pre-dev phase, i.e., I'm actively working on it but I haven't written any code yet.
Funnily, compared to my teenage self, I now think that the coding part is going to be the least of the issues. Of course, working with an old architecture that is severely limited in storage and computational capabilities raises some interesting challenges, but I do not expect them to be unsurmountable.
Doing all the graphics and the sounds all while keeping it an interesting gameplay experience (good narrative, challenging but not frustrating puzzles) will be the much harder task, I think. And ultimately there's also the problem that the majority of all indie game projects is facing: sticking with it until the end.
Getting my historical fiction novel published. I finished writing it a couple of months back. Extremely short plot summary: guy deserts from the Roman XI legion, goes back home only to find that his entire province is about to revolt against the Roman Empire at the height of its power. It's one of the most spectacular feats of collective self-immolation in human history and it had a large effect on human history.
I think not enough has been written about the role of abject stupidity in human affairs. This book is an attempt to correct that.
Thanks! It's historical fiction so 90% true :-) The novel is set during the First Jewish–Roman War[0] and I tried as much as possible to adhere to what we know of actual events. There's a good case to be made that the effect it had on Judaism greatly impacted the development of Christianity. Plus it helped crown the Flavian Dynasty. I have just a short blurb and the first chapter here[1]. I'll definitely post more about the book and the process if I manage to get it published. There are quite a few aspiring novelists here so it might be encouraging to them.
I'm working on JSON BinPack (https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com), a binary serialization format for JSON (think of it as a Protobuf alternative) with a strong focus on space-efficiency for reducing costs when transferring structured data over 5G and satellite transceivers for robotics, IoT, automotive, etc.
If you work at any of those industries and pay a lot for data transfer, please reach out! I'm trying to talk to as many people as possible to make sure JSON BinPack fits their use case well (I'm trying to build a business around it).
It was originally designed during my (award-winning!) research at the University of Oxford (https://www.jviotti.com/dissertation.pdf), and it was proven to be more space-efficient than any tested alternative in every single tested case (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799), beating Protocol Buffers for up to ~75%.
While designing it was already difficult, implementing a C++ production-ready version has proven to be very tricky, leading me to branch off to various other pre-requisite projects, like an ultra-fast JSON Schema compiler for nano-second schema validation (https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsontoolkit) (for which I'm publishing a paper soon).
Don't know if you'll see this, but I really like your work. I read your dissertation at least twice, it's well written and informative.
In my day job I have multiple large json files, used in an internal in-house application, into which I serialize a database, and working with them is much faster than using the database (for some workloads). Although the main reason to do so is just for using git for source control.
In the future I plan on migrating all the code to working off the json files, but that won't happen for some time yet.
I was looking for a fast json library and that's why I discovered your paper and your project, although that was some months after I have started working on that project and it was too late to change.
Currently I use the (very slow) json.net library for most serialization/deserialization, it's fast enough for the specific places where I use them, but for some specific workload that has to be fast I use RapidJson (the code in that part is already c++), but only its streaming parser, which blazingly fast, at the cost of some development. I tried using simdjson but had trouble compiling it at the time.
By the way, in your dissertation you don't mention RapidJson, nor json.net, nor simdjson. Is there a reason why you didn't compare them?
Hey olvyo, thanks for your nice comments! We should definitely connect!
> By the way, in your dissertation you don't mention RapidJson, nor json.net, nor simdjson. Is there a reason why you didn't compare them?
My research was focused on space-efficiency more than parsing performance, so I didn't talk about that problem. However the long-term goal is that by using JSON BinPack's binary encoding, you should have a better time parsing it, as you don't have to deal with the JSON grammar.
The json storage we currently use is kind of "secondary" to the database, and so there currently we don't verify it. The relational database we use does have a schema, of course.
Not verifying the json schema is something that is sorely missing, since the files get corrupted from time to time and this is discovered only during deserialization. Unfortunately this is something I don't have enough time to add, as we're swamped with other work (our app is huge and we are a very small time). We just tell our internal users to re-serialize the database to fix these corruptions, which is unfortunate and costly, but the best we can do at the moment.
I wrote more about that aspect of my internal app here.
Like I wrote, when in a future version we'll drop the database completely, and work only off those json files, I'll also introduce schema validation. That won't happen for some time though.
Thanks for your answer, I understand now why you didn't measure the performance of simdjson etc. into account.
I have thought in the past about using BinPack for my json documents, but: I want them to remain as human readable as possible, since the reason to move to json from a DB, was to make database diffs into readable diffs, and BinPack isn't readable.
I also want users to be able to use existing tools on the json files (e.g. the jq tool), but existing tools don't understand BinPack (yet?).
I think BinPack would shine in an RPC/IPC setting. Just recently there was this big discussion here about systemd replacing D-BUS with a json-based IPC and a huge discussion around the waste of using plain json to do that.
Currently experimenting with programmatic generation of json schemas via https://github.com/sinclairzx81/typebox. Trying to maximize reuse of schema components.
Was wondering if JSON BinPack is a good serialization format to sign json documents?
I'm building a greenhouse. The frame is done, and I've got plastic and a door on it. Next, I'd like to build boxes to hold soil and allow for easy watering.
There's been a lot of innovation in build tools for other languages recently: turborepo, nx, poetry. Also Monorepo build tools like Bazel, Pants, or Buck. Mill aims to bring a lot of those innovations to the JVM ecosystem which is currently dominated by old stalwarts like Maven (circa 2004) or Gradle (2008), which although improving definitely have the weight of legacy holding back their potential
Mill brings things like automatic task caching, side-effect-free build tasks, automatic parallalization, automatic detection of task dependencies, task sandboxing/isolation, and other things that are table stakes in modern build tools, along with a concise strongly typed build language with excellent IDE support to make condiguring your build easy and safe (no more yaml!)
I'm implementing a Scheme interpreter in Rust as a way to learn and get bettet in both of those languages (but mainly Rust). I picked the R3RS specification of Scheme as it looked like the simplest one, but I've been surprised by the complexity of numbers in Scheme.
This is the most excited I've been about a programming project in years, and I'm looking forward to the fun and the learning. And I'm really curious to see how slow my intetpreter is going to be compared to the industrial-grade ones.
I'm building Nottawa (https://nottawa.app/), a free and open source C++ live video and VJ app for macOS. The VJ space is pretty built up with expensive and professional level software (TouchDesigner, Resolume, etc.) - Nottawa is aimed at the non-technical, hobby artist who wants some cool, simple, and audioreactive visuals without hiring a pro. Long term vision is a community powered repository of presets which can be loaded in-app. Still optimistically aiming for a 2024 release.
Much of the GLSL is Creative Commons fragments from ShaderToy written by brilliant artist coders from around the world. ImGui and an associated node editor library for the GUI, OpenFrameworks handles the graphics APIs. This is my first serious foray into shaders, C++, and OpenGL, meaning if I can ship a product and it helps one single artist then I'll walk away very happy.
I'm standing on the shoulders of giants with this one. Huge gratitude and respect for Inigo (IQ), Omar (ocornut), and Michal (thedmd).
Building a little CLI tool that stores API requests and spins up a small REST server that allows them to be pinged. This stemmed from being on a flight, not wanting to buy WiFi, or the WiFi being slow and I just want to build something around an API.
https://bauble.studio/ is a programmatic 3D art playground that I've been working on for a while now, and I'm pretty excited about it! It's based around signed distance functions, which are a way to represent 3D shapes as, well, functions, and you can do a lot of like weird mathematical distortions and operations that give you cool new shapes. Like average two shapes together, or take the modulo of space to infinitely repeat something... it's a really fun and powerful way to make certain kinds of shapes.
SDFs are very cool in general, and widely used in the generative art communities, but kinda hard to wrangle when you're writing shader code directly. They really are functions, but GLSL doesn't support first-class functions, so if you want to compose shapes you have to manually plumb a bunch of arguments around. So Bauble is essentially a high-level GLSL compiler that lets you model SDFs as first-class values, and as a result you can make a pretty cool 3D shape in just a few lines of code. And then 3D print them!
I need to do some actual work to promote and publicize it once I'm done with the documentation and implement a few more primitives, but it's very close!
Depending on the data, maybe? SDFs aren't great at rendering large numbers of enumerated objects -- something like a point cloud would be prohibitively expensive, so I wouldn't think to use them for like traditional graphing.
Basically taking the function (1 / (cos(x) + sin(y))) and adding it to itself 8 times, each time scaling and rotating the input a little more (:f).
I'm curious if it looks the same on all GPUs because it kinda relies on floating point precision errors to give it that film-grainy textured effect. And it definitely divides by zero sometimes.
So if you've ever loaded Bauble before you might have a stale and no-longer-working version of the tutorial cached in localStorage -- if you just clear out the script and refresh it will restore the default one. If that's still erroring, please let me know!
Oh yeah if you clear localStorage like from dev tools, Bauble will re-save the script before refresh, putting it right back where it was. But if you like cmd-a backspace to empty the contents of the script and then refresh it’ll load the default.
I'm working on my scifi novel. I had started writing it when LLMs started taking off - I had been doing AI for two decades and I was well-placed to be in a good position to profit with the rise of LLMs, but I ended up gaining nothing much and I was depressed about it - so I started writing instead. Been picking at it for about a year before befriending an editor who encouraged me to keep writing. He's helped me developmentally edit it to a point I am now ready to work on my second draft.
It's a hard scifi novel with mild existential horror tones that is borne mostly of maths jokes. At one point the main character tries to escape the matrix (reality). But the matrix is defective, so the best way out was to orthogonalize the subspace and reduce the matrix to its eigenbasis instead. Most of the scenes are based on similar maths jokes.
Tentative name is Diagonalization of the Meta (I had previously called it The Metaverse).
At this point I'm writing mostly for myself. GTM strategies for novels... that's an interesting way to think about things. I've not thought about it just yet. Happy to hear if you have any ideas tho.
I'm working on a production version that allows for the cloning of identification cards with or without RFID using a 7 color epaper display I call psychic paper. Raw BOM is ~$100 I presented it at skywalks and defcon 32.
The hardware and software is really all built out the real thing is to find the right epaper display (4.01 inch 7 color display) and an easy way to display the badge. I moved to a pimoroni instead of waveshare due to an easier way to program the system . See https://github.com/zitterbewegung/psychic_paper
I recently switched jobs, and as I've become more comfortable in my new job, I realized that my old job completely sucked the creativity and fun out of programming for me. I did not have any energy for any projects in my spare time while working in my previous job, so the 1,5 months I've been focusing on taking small ideas and running with them.
This weekend I got an idea to create a 2D-pattern from a 1D initial pattern. I put it on https://ige.land/, and I find it very fun and satisfying to play around with. It's not so elegant and pretty, but it's fun for me, and that's all I was looking for! Click any cell to change that color in the pattern. Right click or long press to set the length of the 1D pattern. It's also fun to first create a pattern and then resize the browser window to see how it looks like.
So, what I'm working on is not really an interesting project or product. I'm working on my creativity, playing with code, and in general having more fun with programming. Making it magical for myself again.
I'm not sure if it's 100% in line with the spirit of the thread, but it's what I'm most excited to be working on! :-)
I've been working on an audio DSP language and IDE https://ravescript.com and a DAW https://ravescript-next.deno.dev/ - both are in a good condition but still require a ton of work to be complete. Trying also to combine the two projects into one. Key features (especially in the DAW) are that the audio engine and the graphics engine are made from scratch and utilize WebAssembly/WebGL in a very efficient/performant architecture.
I love this and I remember your amazing work on wavepot from back in the day <3
It was what got me excited about audio dev, now pursuing a similar quest.
I'm writing a book publicly: Automated Agents [1].
When I first joined a startup building a chatbot for customer service, there was a lot of noise and hype. We built a decent product and our company went from 3 people to 30 in 2 years. We resolved millions of customer service issues. The book I'm writing is the guide I wish existed when I was getting started.
It's still a draft, but the main goal is to serve as a guide for both technical and non technical folks.
I'm working on https://ai2sql.io/ , an AI-powered tool that converts natural language to SQL queries. We just hit a significant milestone - $9K MRR!
It's been an exciting journey building this in public. Our goal is to make database querying more accessible to non-technical users while also boosting productivity for seasoned developers.
Currently, we're focusing on expanding our language support and improving query optimization. We're also exploring ideas for integrating more advanced AI models to handle increasingly complex query scenarios.
Any fellow devs working on AI tools or database technologies? I'd love to hear about your projects or exchange ideas!
IMO it's a good idea to provide a free trial without asking CC details. Seeing that we have tools like https://postgres.new/ which offer similar functionality for free
I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.
It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).
This is really nice! I couldn’t find it in your feature set and maybe it is there, but I am looking for a way to do Anki card reviews without looking at the screen.
The other day I was on a 6h solo road trip and thought how useful it would have been if I could just open Anki on my phone and do my daily reviews without direct interaction. With a combination of TTS/STT and some background noise reduction this would be a neat feature: card appears, word/sentence is spoken, I have 60s for a response which is evaluated and automatically rated, then repeat. Maybe also find a way to keep the screen black to prevent distraction.
That would be really cool. Unfortunately there's not much you can do on mobile with Anki extensions, so what you've described would have to be a standalone app. You could definitely wire up TTS fields with this add-on, but you'd still have to manually rate your answer.
I'm not sure if you care, but one of my biggest issues with Anki is that in theory there should be high quality official vocabulary decks and if you want to make a custom deck, all you really should have to do is select the words you want in your deck.
One of the worst parts about learning vocabulary with Anki isn't with the spaced repetition but rather the mechanism that adds new cards to your pool of "learning" cards. You might be grinding 10 to 30 words per day, but the ones you actually need are so far spaced out that 90% of the time is being wasted with poor retention, because you don't know or care about the context those words are used in. This means learning a language is an X year slog that you must get through "all or nothing" instead of being milestone driven.
Anki needs to become vocabulary aware so that you learn words and concepts instead of cards. Then an LLM driven add-on could automatically filter down the base deck based on whether the word is relevant to the PDF or picture you provide.
Most language learning tools are crap because they don't adapt to your particular goals and needs.
I have personally built something similar that takes a video and just cuts out the subtitles, a thumbnail/snapshot and the audio track to generate anki decks of a video file and since it only takes a month at most to get through the entire deck, most of the pain is actually in finding novel video files rather than using Anki.
Real estate search for homes in Ireland where you can travel by bike, train, and walking. Most Irish (and other) property websites just give you a road map, this starts off with a public transport and biking map, and has color-coded rail commute times, etc.
It was something I built for myself years and years ago and then ignored, but when I put it online so my wife could use it, other people started to as well. I lost my job a few months ago and decided to overhaul it. It's how we got a house on a few acres a 15 minute bike ride from the train an hour from Dublin with gigabit fibre under €100,000 in 2019.
www.gaffologist.com. Let me know you saw me on HN!
Some feedback: looks nice, but an instant turn-off for me is the requirement to sign up before I try it out. It meant I didn't try it out, and seems unnecessary.
Of course - I had it open to the public for a long time but I am trying to figure out what to do with it long term. I don't yet know how to make it support itself with free traffic.
Even the signup is just a jotform that emails me, I'm still at the point where I make accounts manually.
Working on https://shepherd.com/ and trying to help readers find books they will LOVE (not just like).
In a few days, launching user accounts + our first user feature using our new Book DNA review system that is trying to help narrow in on the type of books you love and why. The goal is to serve better recommendations going forward and get more people excited about reading.
Yep, I am different because I focus on helping readers find books they will LOVE (not just like).
So, I am trying to figure out why readers like specific books and how to get a book in front of them with a higher chance of them loving it. I am trying to build a Book DNA profile of each reader and see if I can use that data to deliver a better recommendation to them. I am hoping to increase excitement around reading if I can achieve this.
The second focus is on helping readers browse and explore books in new/fun/unique ways. This is where I started, as it was an easier place to get going, and we've asked over 12,000 authors and experts to share five books around a topic, theme, or mood they are experts in or passionate about. We are trying to connect those in fun ways so you can follow your curiosity through the website. And we have a lot more crazier ideas coming :).
The third focus is to build a strong community around sharing what books I love and celebrating them.
I've been working on a site that helps you find in-person work in NYC that is actually convenient: https://walkablework.com
I cofounded a remote startup in 2021 that I ended up leaving after a few years because I found the remote culture to be very isolating and I didn't feel like it would lead to a successful company. Many companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted to build this site to give people the power to find good jobs, companies, and teams that are convenient for them. Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job on it!
I’m not supporting Seattle yet but would love to add it in the future! If you go to the website and click on the “Add a Job” link in the nav bar, there should be some instructions for sending over information about the job
I'm currently finalising a Security Operations app that centralises triage for security alerts (North / https://north.sh) into an intuitive interface that better helps Security Operations teams, MSSPs & SOCs.
It tries to deal with alert fatigue via some nice de-duplication techniques (via customisable aggregation and correlation rules), manages and runs detection rules against different logging platforms (Elastic, Splunk and ALA/Azure) with Validation and Simulation testing, and will lower the time that it takes to determine malicious activity by presenting as much relevant information per security alert as possible.
Hopefully to launch sometime before end-of-year. If you're interested, I'm always free to talk via alex@sinn.io, or sign up to the newsletter.
I'm working on an exercise database and a strength training app.
Two years ago I tore my meniscus and had to go through physical therapy. The experience was eye-opening! Before PT, I thought I was relatively fit because I wasn't overweight, walked a bit, and went to yoga 1-2 times a week. At PT, the therapists basically told me, "You tore your meniscus because you're weak." I had just turned 40. I noticed that I could tweak my back if I sneezed wrong. My mental model of myself hadn't caught up with the stressors of aging that were set upon me. I had never been much into weight lifting before, but I needed to update the way I was taking care of myself.
I didn't know many strength training exercises. Like any good engineer, I started to build a database. It's free and open source:
I needed a way to track my workouts, so I started to build an app. Over time the app grew beyond tracking my workouts to planning them too.
The app isn't for sale yet; I'm just looking for testers now. Sign up at the first link and try it out for free. Let me know what you think if you want to have a hand shaping the app that's worked for me for two years and counting. I love talking about strength training. Email welcome!
If you haven't heard of exrx.net, I strongly suggest you check them out. Their exercise database is excellent, and they have some of best research exercise advice sprinkled throughout their website.
exrx.net is such a good resource. Thanks for boosting it.
If I were really focused on hypertrophy, I think I'd use exrx.net more. The site does an amazing job detailing ~41 muscles and exercises to activate those muscles.
For me, I will not be competing in body building competitions (Never say never!). I mostly just want to be able to lift a kid, piece of furniture, etc. without getting hurt. I'm not too particular if I'm working my "gastrocnemius"[1] or "soleus"[2]. I'm okay with working out my "calves" and calling it a day. For better and worse, I've condensed the Long Haul Fitness database to focus on 21 simpler muscle groups that are more approachable for gym mortals.
A marketplace that makes booking a hair transplant overseas easier! Why overseas? Because, not only are they are 10-15k cheaper outside of the US. The quality is better! Doctors overseas do hair transplants every day as opposed to the states where they may only do once a month.
Anyways, I am trying to make sure people only go to reputable clinics, and eventually let them pay online (instead of carrying cash). Check it out!
I’m currently enhancing the documentation for my project, PGQueuer.
About PGQueuer:
PGQueuer is a minimalist, high-performance job queue library for Python, leveraging PostgreSQL’s LISTEN/NOTIFY for efficient job management. It’s perfect for handling background tasks and managing workflows with simplicity and reliability
https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of customers that want to connect their own domains.
Currently working on:
- Further improving the embeddable DNS widget (to help/automate users updating their DNS records) that launched last month
- Rolling out the new hybrid self hosted version that allows traffic and certs to only go through your servers, while getting the full benefit of the cloud version
- Tinkering with some AI ideas for improving the existing WAF features (tricky, but potentially powerful)
- Making Edge Sequences (pattern matching and rules applied at the edge) more flexible and powerful with more composable options and ways to match requests
Recently hit a milestone of over a million domains served!
Started my masters at Georgia Tech [1] this summer. Still in the first semester, but really enjoying so far. Just not much spare time on nights and weekends, but it helped me cut down the time spent on social/news/etc.
Thanks! Loving it so far. It has been a long time since I graduated, so using the first semester to get used to a regular study schedule again.
The program is massive (like, 1500+ students in my ML4T [1] class alone; the largest in GT's history), but academically rigorous, with a supportive community, active discussion forums, cool projects, and a small army of TAs. And very affordable, compared to all other programs out there.
It takes a long time for them to process applications, but they seem to honor their deadlines. I got my invitation a few days before the "you should hear from us until this date", and know other folks were on the same boat.
I think it's fair to be skeptical, and there's certainly a fair share of poor educational programs out there.
Having said that, like anything in life, you get what you put in. And at least in the case of GT, their online program is exactly the same they have on campus; same content, same projects, same academic rigor. The only difference is that on-campus has many more classes to choose from.
Of course YMMV. I don't really care about the degree itself; doing it for purely personal enrichment.
It lets you use whatever you’re already doing for auth, and lets you become an oauth provider, or issue tokens instead of people passing API keys, on top of that.
The more interesting aspect of that you could use it to bolt on an entire app store or ecosystem on top of your existing product or api.
(ping me if you want to look at this more seriously from a business perspective!)
CV pipeline to get some additional realtime stats for an annual Mario Kart 8 LAN tournament my friends and I run, hoping to be able to get real time race position tracking and other stats like boost/drift %, per-player item distributions, average time to 10 coins, and whatever else we can think of (and make work)
You're going into first place too early. You kinda have to cruse in 2nd until the very end to avoid blue shells. Better yet, stay in 9th as long as possible - that's the highest position you can get the good drops like Blue Shells, Bullets, etc. But I think you can get red shells in 2nd, so just save those till the end.
I am busy rebuilding my music studio with only gear from the late 90s/2000. It's much more fun to relive my youth and with patience less expensive than I thought.
Oh those were golden years in the studio, hope you have a lot of fun.
Just casting my mind back to the setup we had in '99:
Juno 106, Korg Monopoly, TX816. Prophet 5, Seq Circuits Pro1,
Novation bass station, 909, Korg Wavestation (rack), Korg M1, EMU
sampler (EIII rack IIRC), Atari Mega 4 + Cubase for seqs, a IoMega zip
drive for storage that killed every other project with click of death,
and fucking midi cables and audio snakes running everywhere... great
days.
I made a website where you can play chess puzzles against Stockfish.
I had the idea for a website where you can play chess puzzles, but if you make the wrong move, the puzzle turns into a game against Stockfish. This opens the door to either find alternative solutions or fail miserably (at some point you realize you are not following the puzzle any more). I think its a more engaging way to play puzzles!
This is my first online project, feedback is highly appreciated!
The "me database" tracking my gps for physical location, urls visited, etc..
This way I can search through all my physical and computer activity to answer questions like: how many times did I go to the gym last year? or how many leetcode questions did I do this month?
I also played with this idea of a Memex [1] a few times already, but I always struggle with the actual usefulness of the data. Most of the time, the greatest fun for me is setting up the systems and seeing it all come together in a single database, but I tend to fall behind as soon as it is manual work to keep something updated.
For location, I found that the easiest and most privacy-friendly way of doing this without wrecking the battery of my main phone was to get a cheap used Android phone with dual GPS (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed and then pipe the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network [3] when I am home.
thanks for the tip. my battery is definitely getting crushed so i might need to mirror that local logging for ios. But yes, the usefulness of it all will be the big question.
I tracked a work log in a "did" list for work and that was useful because you often need regular reporting (standups, perf reviews).
No one needs any location updates on how often I've been to the gym.
Exactly. In my case, I noticed that having an extra device also helped me to not obsess about tracking. I started taking it with me only when I knew that I would be going an interesting route or on a trip to a place I haven’t been before.
Seeing a map with many different paths is way more fun than seeing the same paths just thicker. Interestingly, this also made me take more detours and explore my city and surrounding areas more even if it was a „boring“ route.
Nice I plan on doing this for a whole year, hopefully 2025, but with lots of sleep data possibly with openBCI components and other devices and see if I can gain insight into some weird health phenomenons I've been experiencing.
Oh nice. I feel like so many things affect my sleep including diet, mood, how long it’s been since I doom scrolled. I wonder if any of that can help you investigate.
Building an electric 1973 Ferrari Dino to compete in the battle of the builders at SEMA in November. Lots of fun electronics and software, as well as mechanical challenges to overcome.
I’m working on a collaborative reading app called Rdrs. You can upload a ebook, create a reading group, invite others and your reading position, comments and highlights are synced live with the group. You can also read privately, and as its web-based is available on any device.
I’m still in active development so there may be bugs or crashes, but I’d be very interested in your feedback.
This a really cool idea. I've just started a book club with my room mates and we'd be keen to give this a try, especially if we can leave notes/thoughts for one another as we go through
Yes, you can leave comments on text and I've just implemented comment replies, so you can have conversations on the comments. You can upload your own books as long as they're DRM-free epubs.
Please be aware it's still very buggy so bits may break. If you do decide to try it, I'd appreciate any bug reports or feature ideas you may have.
Google Sheets add-on for quickly generating forecasts on seasonal, time series data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPUdTCxURgg . Submitted it to the Google Workspace Marketplace a few days ago, hoping it'll get approved soon!
I’m working on https://www.zonehero.io/ to deliver a cost effective alternative to AWS native load balancing (ALB).
We already had a PoC which saved our customer 50% vs ALB (in their case that’s more than a million dollars a year), we’re now working on tooling and scaling the solution up!
Next we want to bring wasm modules to the lbs, to do edge traffic curation, bring your own model, etc.
In technical terms, we offer a fully managed control plane for an optimised version of envoy running on EC2, and we react in near real time to avoid unnecessary cross AZ traffic (the key to the costs savings).
I'm plugging away on my BitGrid project.... a Turing complete stripped down version of an FPGA without routing fabric and with added delays (for reasons). I'm learning KiCad 8.0, so I can do schematics and build a prototype cell out of TTL.[1]
I'm also re-acquainting myself with Verilog so I can do an ASIC prototype through TinyTapeout. The main question that I hope to answer is just how much power a bitgrid cell actually consumes, both static and dynamic. If it's low enough, then it'll give Petaflops to the masses, if not.. it's a curiosity.
Along that path, I've learned that the configuration memory for the LUTs is going to consume most of the silicon. Since it's all just D flip-flops... I figured I could dual-use it as memory without loss of generalization. You can virtually add 2 bytes of memory in a cell in any of the 4 directions... so I call it IsoLinear Memory.[2] ;-)
I should be able to make the deadline for TinyTapeout 9, in November. Meanwhile I'll update my emulator to include Isolinear Memory, and figure out how to program the damned thing. My stretch goal is to figure out how to program it from TinyGrad.[3].
I was using DeepSeek Coder and Claude for verilog quite successfully back in June - saved me a lot of time creating testbenches. Probably better now. I need to try the latest Gemini 1.5 pro to see how it does. I used DeepSeek Coder to create a testbench for some legacy verilog code that was poorly documented - it did quite well, better than I was expecting. It even collected repeated code into tasks which kind of surprised me.
I hadn't even considered trying to use ChatGPT with Verilog. I strongly suspect it will get in the way. My design is pretty darned small, just a grid of uniform cells, with not much else in the way of I/O, etc.
I read about things I don't understand all the time, and the best way I know to train myself to retain information is to actively take notes directly on the thing I am reading on.
Using a highlighter or annotation type tool, if you will.
My last job had an internal tool for deploying all, or a reduced set of, their platform into a kube namespace. We called them One Time Environments and used them for testing and development. They were fantastic, really fast to spin up, and pretty cheap to run as they were on our own hardware. I've never found anything similar that doesn't cost an absolute bomb of money.
Now I've moved to an early startup and I'm really missing the tool. So I've started putting together my own with a few improvements.
This one can support multiple infrastructure types such as ECS, K8S, and anything else you could write an agent for. It's also going to do the same for zero trust auth, starting with tailscale.
Once we've got it up and running we're going to open source it. Could be a few more months though.
Building it using elixir, phoenix, and live view as that's my background.
We're doing this as an internal tool so right now the priority is to make it useful for us. We use tailscale already so we've decided to support that initially. But the auth is setup in a pretty modular way, so anyone should be able to write a different provider for whatever auth system they want to use. I've not come across OpenZiti before but I'd imagine it would be possible to write one for it.
Basically, my rhythm-based roguelike on original NES now has a proper economy, with gold gain and shops to spend the gold in. It also now supports PAL and Dendy systems, which is especially wonky due to the different framerate, but helped a bit by this being a rhythm game. As long as the music plays at the correct tempo, the rest of the game adapts its speed and "feels" correct at the lower framerate.
Tons of work left to do, most of it pixel art (I'm learning as I go) but it's progressing quite nicely.
What made you decide to build for the NES specifically at opposed to building for a fantasy console with similar restrictions but more usability like the Pico-8?
For this particular project, I was initially inspired by the way Gauntlet II draws huge fields of enemies, using the trick of placing them on the background layer. I wondered if CotN's mechanics could be imitated using that technique, and then I realized that the nature of the rhythm tracking meant I'd have more than a single hardware frame to process updates. That made the project possible at all.
Separately, I enjoy the process of writing 6502 assembly and working with hardware restrictions. It's nice that I can hand someone a real cartridge, to plug into their almost 40-year old game console, and it just works. There's a certain nostalgic magic there that's thrilling in its own unique way, that a modern fantasy console just doesn't deliver on. (The Pico-8 is delightful in its own way, of course. It's a great little toolkit.)
Easy Data Transform v2 ( https://www.easydatatransform.com ). It is GUI based data wrangling tool for people who aren't (or don't want to be) programmers. 20 years of running a 1-man software company in January.
About to start work on a side project. A map-driven web database of films, TV series, books, thatre and computer games based on where and when they are set. So if you want to watch something set in 1880s Paris, you can. Or you want to see something set in China in the 17th century.
Probably looking for a name that is much more approachable for a wide audience. Along the lines of "take me back" or playing with where/when or time/place or something like that.
I just picked up an old Sheldon Lathe. I got it for $200 and hauled it myself with a drop trailer. Its going to need a lot of work but its a beautiful old machine.
There's an interesting parallel when you get to the edge of your measurement resolution--with a chop saw or similar it might be 1/64" but with a lathe it's more like 0,0005"--where the "eye" takes over and you're doing it by feel. It's the same judgments and reactions, although the effects are magnified by 30x, it's really the same skillset--steady hands, careful judgment, and measure twice, cut once.
It tracks 1000+ startups that have been founded in the last 3 years and showcases how their product, mission, team size, founders, etc. evolve week over week. It is interesting to see how quickly early stage startups pivot.
Looking for feedback/suggestions about how I can make this more useful.
Decided after all these years to start to create open source libraries around things I've worked with in the past.
As worked a lot with Kubernetes in the past, I started with creating a Kubernetes Operator alternative to external-dns I call Phonebook: https://github.com/pier-oliviert/phonebook
It lets you control DNS record like you would any other native resources in Kubernetes through CRDs. Open-sourced it last week and there's already a bunch of features that are planned for the operator"
- cert-manager's support for DNS-01 challenges
- More support for other providers
- Increase support for each provider that already exists
- etc.
If you find you're spending too much time on hacker news, you can actually set anti-procrastination settings in your profile. I use them and it's definitely helped a lot!
It can easily be a huge waste of time while still feeling like it's enriching. And even if it is enriching, if it gets in the way of other stuff you really need to to be doing, then it's a problem.
Hit the nail on the head. I've quit every other social media site with the exception of HackerNews. And while some would argue HN isn't social media, I would disagree; I'd argue most of what makes HN so popular is the commenters.
I've found that in this regard, HN is no less addictive to me than a site like Reddit. I impulsively check it when I'm bored and find myself wasting time in long comment threads that over the years I have found more and more pessimistic. Still far better than Reddit, but the pessimism gets to me to a point where I can't help but feel jaded. Anyway, I just don't think it's good for me anymore.
- Giving up Arma3 gamemode dev maintenance for a large-ish community, but hanging around to teach people git/github and provide wisdom / teach how to do software dev (a lot of folks have minimal software experience). Although debating whether to straight up leave the community.
I'm working on a solar forecast for my off-grid PV installation. It's a small install of 1kWp (2 bifacial panels) with a 4kWh battery. I chew through about 25% of my battery each day and so a forecast of the next few days or so is very useful to help me decide whether I can dip heavily into the battery or whether I should be a bit more conservative about power use.
I am working on a new Computer Algebra System (CAS) tool, which is a programming language focused on math called Openbirch https://gitlab.com/Sveske-Juice/openbirch.
It will probably be licensed with some open source license like GPL or MIT. Right now there really isn't much functionality, but i hope that it someday will be as good as other existing CAS tools like Maple and WolframAlpha.
The main motivation for this project besides from learning, is that there really isn't any modern open source alternatives to the leading CAS tools (at least that i know of).
Currently you can define some functions which will be autorun on expressions. So if you for example write an expression by itself, like `d/dx x^2` it will automatically call a "main" function, which among other things handles differentiation. So it will be evaluated to 2*x.
I would love to see your mathmatica like CAS. I'm still kind of new to this field of CS :D
Edit: I actually rewrote it to https://github.com/anandijain/cas8.rs to have Exprs be reference counted (makes it much faster), but all of the documentation is on the first link
I am building a WASM based "grid editor". It's really just a way to build a UI for anything (desktop, mobile, web) by slicing up a grid and putting content in it. Then you can export the grid in an extremely portable format that can be reas anywhere (no, not json, even simpler) and use that grid data to implement your UI. The grid data contains the content or references to content which you can just apply on render.
visualgrideditor.app
Mad with Odin, compiled to WASM, vanilla JS and has Laravel integration. I just need to alpha test this more and see if there's anybody who wants to use it.
This is a project I started to scratch an itch I had at work. We use jira there, and our setup is such that it takes about 8-10 seconds to load a page. So to make things more usable, the local_jira downloads the data from the server, saves it in a local database, and make it available. jira_gui is a simple gui for it.
I feel this. I've set something up for myself to fetch the data just to be able to better search and group things without having to wait for their sluggish API and the overweight SPA.
fond memories. we did tv guides for a local cable system for a bit in the early 90s. they had a customer db, but no "export" beyond sending print jobs to their bigarse line printer.
but it was a parallel port and i had use of a luggable with a bidirectional parallel port so i'd haul that in once a month, hook it up, and have them run a "hello customer" fake billing run, which was hoovered up and stripped down to the address list we needed to mail to that month.
Have a look at the Internet Printing Protocol. I built a NodeJS app that pretended to be a printer and could receive real time transactional data from a legacy POS/software. No drivers required… supports HTTP auth… all OS’s have great support for it.
I'm still pretty early in terms of figuring out if this approach is better for larger projects. I can confidently say it works great on small things - for small changes on small files the AST approach works pretty well. You can say things like "add a click listener to the button that calls a function to tally the user's score" to a simple game and it will do it. That is, less than a minute after typing the prompt, you will see the code update in the editor and see your preview-webview update with your changes applied.
However, I have noticed that the AST code quality heavily depends on how common it is in the training set. I think I will have to add documentation to it through RAG or something - because OpenAI's models that I'm using seem to have limited experience writing esprima for JavaScript for example.
So it's hit or miss. In some cases I do feel like I'm throwing stupid compute at solving small problems and it's unnecessary - however, as I work on the project, it is getting better and better at successfully making the modifications. Some of that is me improving the prompts, some of it is OpenAI improving the models themselves, and some of it is the infrastructure I'm building for the project itself.
I did notice a huge improvement when o1-mini released. It is dramatically better at writing the AST code than GPT-4o or 4o-mini. I haven't tried Claude 3.5 yet but I've been hearing it does an exceptional job at code writing - not sure about my AST requirements though!
I am working on https://geobase.app/ which is a platform for geospatial full-stack developers.
We have created workflows that a specific to the geospatial, mapping and GIS industry use cases. This is currently in private beta but going live in a few weeks. It is built on top of supabase's self-hosted stack.
I was excited about the Cloudflare announcements this past week. I primarily use AWS in my day job, but I wanted to broaden my knowledge. This weekend, I started building a simple to-do application using Durable Objects and the newly announced zero-latency SQLite storage. In just a few hours, I familiarized myself with Cloudflare and got the basic CRUD operations working. Next weekend, I plan to add WebSocket publications and a few other features, and then write a blog post about it. It was a great learning experience, and I’m impressed with what Cloudflare is doing.
I'm trying to make it easier to run clubs, associations & organizations with a platform called embolt.app[1].
We're offering online memberships, event management, and a member database packed with features. Membership management is a crowded space, but it's also a low-tech space with lots of sleeping giants not willing to iterate on their product.
It's been a really fun project so far and even more rewarding to see clubs using embolt for their daily operations.
Thank you! We chose PayPal to ensure clubs and organizations can use our platform without needing a bank account or 501c3 registration, we also plan to leverage PayPal's non-profit transaction discount program for clubs who _are_ registered as 501c3 to provide even lower fees.
A lot of small-medium sized clubs today use a pretty scrappy set of tools to get by (PayPal / Sheets / Forms) but we're going to offer a x10 better experience paired with low transaction fees.
If you want to tell me more about what you'd use embolt for feel free to shoot me an email over at grant at embolt.app!
I’m currently working on a Static HTML Comment system for my blog[1]. I recently moved my blog from Wordpress to Hugo and wanted to move away from Disqus. The goal is to build a backend that receives the comment, forwards to Telegram for approval and then push a code to Github for rebuilding the site. I’ve implemented a POC currently with Google Apps Script, but trying to build a robust backend with Flask. Preventing spam is also yet another puzzle.
Professionally: I'm continuing with Wyndly [1], my YC startup. I believe more and more in a future without any allergies.
Socially: I'm trying to connect people more, so I'm starting a social club [2]. If it just ends up with people meeting up in meatspace regularly, then it's a win.
Personally: well, my wife just purchased 6 pieces of flatpak furniture, so I'm building it!
Working on validating a startup idea I had 12 years ago. It's like Pingdom for ads, periodically checking if your ads are being blocked by AdBlockers.
I always thought the idea was somewhat weak, but not enough to discard entirely. So, along with a friend, I built a prototype over the last two weeks, and now we're trying to validate it: https://scanningfox.com/
I'm enjoying using Elixir for this project. As a long-time Erlang dev, I was initially skeptical about Elixir, but Phoenix.LiveView has changed my opinion.
using AI to audit sneaky, slippery, weaselly lawyers for claims. after 8 years of estate litigation, a lot of crap revealed in courts cause papers where counsels who collude to bleed the estates. AI does the legal issues analysis and match the lawyers subsequent motions to verify their appropriate and loyal response for the client's cause. On target to recover millions.
That's cool. IANAL however I know people who got screwed like this in my country and were laughed at when they voiced their suspicions 'you are not a lawyer, you don't understand, don't worry, just pay and trust us' and 'you don't think the judge would allow it if your suspicions had any merit now, do you?'.
Trying to make production database access easy while avoiding dropping a table in production.
Experimenting with websockets right now so you don't have to create formal requests like a pull request anymore but instead can have more fluent database access sessions while another engineer watches over your virtual shoulder.
Helping React devs move their state to the URL, in a type-safe way.
nuqs [1] started as a Next.js-only library, but recently I've been working on supporting all major React frameworks & routers (Remix, React Router, plain React with Vite etc).
I've been writing a short sci fi story for fun, a michael crichton inspired techno thriller, called Panopticon [0]. Its set in our time frame and is all about encryption and spy craft!
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7... (first 20 pages)
I'm working on a foresight and emergency response team to see large calamities coming before they happen, and hopefully be able to do something about it. We put out weekly minutes at https://blog.sentinel-team.org
Working on my side project https://gametje.com. It's an alternative to Jackbox games but it has a lower barrier for entry. All you need is a device with a web browser to play (also works with Chromecast). I'm trying to write some better tutorials for the early games I created to make it easier to get a feel for the gameplay. Also trying to work on the ui/ux flow to make it easier for people to understand what it is and how to create and host a game.
I just started building a small website for structural engineers with various tools on it (eg. capacity of a steel column). I have spent thousands of hours in the past building fancy excel (incl. vba)and mathcad documents for personal use and this is my first time trying to do it with "real" code. I went with Blazor and c#, so far it looks like a good choice. The long term goal if the projects is a success and becomes popular would be to have a FEM engine for 2D frame structures running in the browser client-side.
A website that sorts the recent Peloton bike rides by difficulty.
https://pelohard.com/
I love my Peloton and it was really annoying finding a ride with a difficulty over a certain threshold that was recent. I'm an embedded developer by day and did this with a lot of help from ChatGPT and Claude. Hoping to add some more features to it as time goes on.
I'm working on a Civilization type game but built on an economy simulator[0]. So far I've mostly been working on the simulator side but I just started adding player interactions! The goal is to create a system that allows for emergent behaviors and unintended consequences of buying/selling, tax policies, interest fluctuations.
I'm building up a small but resourceful artificial intelligence research group focusing on specializing in the triangle "machine learning - search - natural language processing".
Have got a bit of funding, a building, an 1.3 M€ GPU cluster. Also looking for Ph.D. candidates and contract developers.
(The hard part is spending the money wisely but in 8 weeks - it is a time-limited government budget that "expires" - while teaching writing papers and writing grant applications.)
Wow, just had to comment because this one is hilarious. Everyone else has the typical "I built my own accounting CLI" or "I'm thinking about maybe publishing my devtool", and you're over here casually describing your building. I just have to say: well done, that sounds like quite the life! The world will no doubt appreciate your toil one day, even if you feel stressed in the short term. IDK why, but your comment makes me want to share one of my favorite quotes:
Only with time will the period of my real influence begin and I trust that it will be a long one, for I am firmly convinced of Seneca's promise: "Although envy imposed silence on all who lived with you, those men will come who will judge without ill-will and without favour."
- Schopenhauer's Doctoral Dissertation, The Fourfold Root
I'd throw my hat in the ring as a philosophy-minded SWE who's coming up on the end of my runway while writing my book on unifying symbolic+connectionist AI (going for ~1y now), but your choice of currency tells me you probably don't have a need for any of us yanks. Instead, I'll send you my very strongest best wishes from across the ocean! And while I'm at it, I'll endorse my absolute favorite paper ever written on search, in case it sparks some ideas: Simon & Newell's Human Problem Solving (1970) https://github.com/vlall/Ai-Papers/blob/master/1971_Human%20... . If you're not already teaching it, ofc ;)
This quote in particular pops into my head at least once a day:
The problem solver's search for a solution is an odyssey through the problem space, from one knowledge state to another, until his current knowledge state includes the problem solution.
Working on a library that helps benchmark Active Learning (AL) techniques [1]. This is a form of Machine Learning, where you want to learn a supervised predictor but you don't have labels to start with, and labeling comes at a cost that you need to account for (the term AL can have broader connotations but this is the popular one). We feel the area suffers quite a bit from poor benchmarks, which my colleague and I wrote up about in a paper [2]. To run the many experiments in the paper we had to write a fairly comprehensive codebase that makes it convenient to swap out different bits and pieces of an AL pipeline, which we'll be polishing up now.
PS: If the work is of interest and you want to avoid reading the paper, I have a blogpost too [3].
Affirmator.app - Given a list of affirmations, wisdom & goals (sourced from life-success programs like Earl Nightingale's Strangest Secret, and books like Think and Grow Rich), use text-to-speech to generate voice audio files, leave spaces for you to vocalize the phrases, and then automatically play 20-phrase playlists every morning & day. The phrases can range from high-level "I feel strong and confident" to specific to personal goals "I can confidently play and sing 3 songs on the piano.", "I do 25 push-ups every morning"
The idea is that mindset is important in the morning, and that we all want to do these healthy habits - meditation and yoga - and yet when life get's stressful, it's easy to fall out of a healthy rhythm.
I've been doing deep study about affirmations, our sub-conscious mind, and how to use repetition to change yourself - absolutely fascinating and effective. This Affirmatpr tool can help reduce the effects of depression & anxiety, help you set & internalize goals and habits for your dream life.
If anyone is interested in trying it out - I've got a prototype which can create customized affirmation sessions, and layer it on top of a calm music backing track)
Tech stack: Python / Django (soon) / Text to speech: ElevenLabs & Piper TTS. The automation currently runs with 'cron' on MacOS and Shortcuts.app/Music.app on iPhone.
Everything is open-source (Codeberg) and can run locally instead of cloud hosted, so maximum people can benefit (and so you can set private goals/affirmations that perhaps you don't want everyone to hear about).
I would love to meet others who would be interested in contributing / collaborating, as there is huge potential here. My contact is in my profile.
I'm working on my second novel (genre fiction, both superhero, for fun, no interest in publishing—read: i'm not that good yet)
Last year i wrote a novel about what it'd be like if you were the parent of a teenage superhero, but all you saw was the aversion to touch, panic attacks, unexplained absences, and falling grades (they're obviously lying to you about what the problem is, but you don't know why!).
And how would you handle discovering that it wasn't drugs or her being a victim of assault, but was instead so much worse: that she's the one fighting for her life on the news all the time?
I've just started writing my second, which is superheroes arguing over what to do about one of the villains, who turned good and helped them defeat a Big Bad. The story is still in early stages, so there's plenty more ideas to come up with still.
For a stay at home dad like me, writing is really enjoyable as a hobby because I can do it at the soccer fields while my kids practice for two hours, or I can do it while they're at a gym playing, or at night when they're asleep. I don't have to schedule out a three-hour block to meet up with buddies for tennis a month in advance.
I've been developing ngtly.com (ngtly.com/berlin for context), a platform that automatically curates nightlife events across major European cities—currently covering 23 cities with populations over 300,000. Over the past couple of months, we've attracted about 1.5-2k unique visitors per month, with around 200 returning users. The service is entirely free for nightlife enthusiasts, aiming to provide comprehensive event listings without ads or data collection.
I'm running this project solo, and while it's been rewarding, there are challenges in scaling and sustaining it—like covering operational costs (~€20 per city per month) and expanding to more locations. I'm planning to eventually monetize through partnerships with promoters and venues, but for now, I'm looking for feedback or suggestions on improving the platform and reaching a wider audience without compromising on the user experience. Any insights or critiques from the community would be greatly appreciated.
Hey everyone! I wanted to share what I’ve been working on lately: an app called Unlearn Stress [1] on iOS [2] and Android [3]. It came out of my own struggles with stress and trying to find ways to cope. Some days are just rough and while I’ve had some luck with doctors, I’ve found that stories, especially ones read in my own voice, and breathing exercises really help lift my mood. The app is simple, works completely offline and there’s no data collection like other apps.
My next idea is to use SSML to better control some of the speech and add delays where needed.
https://fitbee.app I'm continuing to build the nutrition tracker I've always wanted myself [1]
This month the focus is improving food data quality & search relevancy. I'm also starting to experiment with some more advanced generative AI use cases in the realm of providing suggestions on what to eat & analysis of your diet.
My kids' elementary school has a running club that I manage. In past years they pay a subscription to a company that's quite expensive to track laps. I decided to implement some software that's better and runs on an rpi.
It's working very well, and the kids like it more because it has audio feedback on laps and time.
Besides the cheap USB qr scanners there's no expenses either.
Thanks for the interest. I will post it publicly soon, but right now it's on my private github. Basically it's a small python app running on a raspberry pi with 2 USB QR scanners. It uses sqlite with a database of QR codes assigned to the students. They wear lanyards with those codes on them. When they start running it logs their start, and every lap they can again. It tracks personal records, total laps, laps per day, and time per lap.
We've received a lot of positive feedback from the kids compared to the old system that was using proprietary software. The problem with that software is it used cell phones for scanning codes, which is very error-prone and takes a long time to register on some phones.
I got notified my NeurIPS paper was accepted this past week, so I've been doing the brush-ups that'll have the manuscript set for camera-ready. Preprint on arxiv with the title "Divide-and-Conquer Predictive Coding" at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05834
You start by learning the words: It augments the repetition aspect of Anki with added context to the words (random example sentences for each work, each time). I curated / generated the set of words in advance.
Then you move to practice these words in chat about different topics (soon voice conversation as well). You get a feedback in each turn about what your mistakes, without interrupting the chat.
I am using DeepL for translation (I am not liking it though, since it is very narrow strict definitions. I will be exploring OpenAI for that soon).
For chat, OpenAI GPT-4o.
This is my first webapp. I used HTMX + AlpineJS, Python, Supabase (Auth, S3, DB), and hosting on my PI.
It's work in progress, but I need to start finding core users to give feedback. I am not really sure how though. I had some tough experiences on Reddit and Discord (understandable tbh).
Building a QA platform so non-tech folks can test and improve LLM products WITHOUT needing developers.
It’s crazy how much time developers waste tweaking hardcoded prompts, writing endless test cases or constantly shift focus between building LLM features and verifying them. It’s usually the product person who should be handling this.
To scale a product, you need an extra set of eyes to double-check the engineers' work before it goes live.
Just want to give non-technical folks the power to test and improve LLM apps themselves!
I'm creating a multi-media project hosted on substack where I write a letter (in a deeply personal and old school correspondence) to my favorite people/creators/ and tell them how they've impacted my life. I give specifics about when and where I first heard/read/saw/etc. their work and what pieces of it have stuck with me over time and become part of my curated worldview and experience.
There aren't any public posts yet because I've been too much of a coward to release them into the wild and promote them even though I think they are great. I'm hoping by commenting here I can pressure myself to update in October with some actual stuff published.
Finally learning piano and drums after playing guitars for years. Thinking of own musical voice for first song, EP, and album. Made this chords poster to help: https://hypertexthero.com/piano/
Working on a default home.html page for my web browser with most used links, note pad, drawing pad, and forms for quickly creating posts for static sites that I’ll publish shortly. It would be nice if Firefox let you define a custom page for new tabs as well as new windows, instead of only Blank Page and Firefox Home (Default).
Usually have the relationship between work and play in mind, and how many of my favorite games have elements of compounding interest in rogue lite game modes where a little bit goes a long way with saved progression.
Harvesting four varieties of potatoes planted in the garden earlier in the year. Thankful to be able to work outdoors listening to the wind and nature.
Thinking about the difficult, important work of nurses and caretakers while helping to manage care for an elderly relative.
I have spent the last year or so restoring a Minecraft skin editor site, that had gone offline for good. I had used that site for years to make my own skins as a child, and while I hadn’t used it in a couple years, I still had friends that relied on it to make their own skins, and were greatly disappointed losing the site.
Starting from a wayback machine archive, I hacked some much needed improvements in to the minimised jquery-based, javascript (a right pain but an excellent learning experience). I implemented a Rails backend for the gallery, and have since been slowly improving it, replacing assets, and growing a community around it.
We recently hit 10k skins on the site!
I am working on rewriting the actual editor from scratch, and releasing the code as open source once all original assets/code have been swapped out.
If anyone wants to check it out:
https://needcoolershoes.com/
(The editor doesnt work on mobile, but the gallery does)
It started with me trying to get weather stats for my city, to give proof to the nagging thought 'Has it really gotten this hotter in the last X years?'
Now its aiming to be a project where one can visualize historical weather data for any place with a lot of stats and trendlines
Still in active development - right now the visualization only has my town in it.
Still working on TheOpenPresenter[0]. It's an open-source & web-based presentation software. Anything you need to show on the screen somewhere, it should be able to do.
It's usable now, but still not user friendly since I'm focusing on the functionality. Hope to get alpha out this month!
Over the last 20 years people have asserted Erlang would make a great language for an MMO server backend. I’ve been working on building an open system around that idea, integrating with Godot. It’s slow going (a few years old now!) but I’ve got a framework that serializes everything with protobuf, builds a lot of the client libraries for Godot on the fly, and works over ENet (UDP) and WebSocket (HTTPS). Have a general abstraction for “tick-based” games that’s starting to feel nice, and thinking about turn-based games with some general state machine functionality. Working on some demos and documentation this week. Maybe present it at a conference and see if anyone else wants to walk this path with me?
Otherwise I’ve been thinking a lot about using Erlang as a control plane in the scientific/hpc realm. I often fantasize about a single system image on the BEAM for running functions as a service, talking to object stores etc.
I'm working on https://github.com/pronopython/rugivi RuGiVi-- an adult python PyGame app to fly over and zoom in and out of a huge image and video collection.
My app can handle landscapes of hundred of thousands of images at once. The last major feature addition was the ability to handle video files. These are presented as a collection of still frames within the "world". Currently I am trying to find bugs within the media loading scheduler mechanism.
The work is quite hard, because despite good installation numbers (pypi) and clones (github), there's literally no feedback whatsoever (bugs, questions etc). If this is because of the adult-use aspect or if this is normal I can't tell but would suggest the first reason. So I have to come up with possible problems people might have all by myself. Any feedback is highly welcomed!
Sounds really cool! Do you have a page describing your project with some pictures? It's funny I checked your post history before asking and found that you made the same comment I'm doing today to someone doing something similar one year ago! Is it what got you started?
Not yet! I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, so my C++ is horrendous. I am still in the very early phases of this project, once I get past the hardcoding all of my variables I will share some more.
I set out to make Loader's number [1], about the largest computable (*) number in googology, fit inside the 280 bytes of a tweet. After succeeding with a 2236 bit program, I got the idea to further improve the size by using Higher Order Abstract Syntax (HOAS), resulting in a big rewrite that along with other optimizations resulted in a 233 byte program [2].
I'm learning QOL hacks to live without a city water supply for 10 days! Should be interesting. Our town just lost its water supply after Hurricane Helene destroyed the water supply pumping station.
And working on a member-owned social network that runs from users countertops to foster dynamics that make for a better social user experience.
I'm debating adding 3 things next: arrival/departures, general airport delays and ground stops, and yes airports outside the US. Less clean TSA like information from those sadly.
> and yes airports outside the US. Less clean TSA like information from those sadly.
Yeah, my impression has been that the whole space is a mess. How great would it be to have an app that can tell me about departures at any given airport in the world, including gate information, boarding / last call, has the plane arrived yet in the first place[0], …
[0]: Very useful to estimate whether there will be a delay or not.
Working on https://usedigest.com, a tool to curate content from any source into a daily email. No this is not just grabbing RSS feeds, we're using tons of APIs to fetch data wherever we can. The goal is to replace the mindless scrolling we all do on a daily basis and try to help people become more productive without the fear of missing out. You can consume the daily email, or read it on the web as we generate a direct link to your digest each day. Here is an example: https://app.usedigest.com/digests/share/b40cd659-bce5-4a38-9...
It is, Mailbrew ended up selling years ago and they stopped working on the product as far as I know. We're rolling out new features weekly and adding more sources and integrations. We're also going to be moving into B2B instead of just only targeting B2C with personal newsletters.
I'm working on an open-source web app to visualize barbell lifts.
Basically trying to provide the best motivation and resources to help people invest in their physical strength which is crucial to health and longevity.
I'm keeping it strictly based on user Google Sheet data - because over the years I've changed apps and it's always hard to get your data out.
So far I have:
- lots of charts
- an cgpt wrapper to talk to your lifting data and get lifting advice
- the best strength calculators (in my opinion)
- a strength ranking system for squat, bench press, deadlift and strict press.
I’m doing a deep dive into the video games of the year 2000.
The plan is to make a threejs site where I can display all my favorite games with models of their original packaging and instruction manuals.
An interesting aspect of the research is that almost all published games are bad or mediocre.
Wikipedia knows about ~800 video games published in the year 2000. Of those, only ~300 either piqued my interest based on description or had reviews above ~70% positive.
I eliminated more of those based on personal interest (realistic flying or sports are not very interesting to me). And even more by watching videos of gameplay.
The level of polish and artistry vary enormously.
I’ve got a list of <100 games I’m very interested in, still. Which is a lot! But the breakdown is interesting to me.
Thanks! I’ll work from this going forward, maybe check it against Wikipedia as a popularity heuristic.
One thing I realized today is that, if I’m doing an “ideal year of gaming”, there’s a limit to the hours I could spend in such a year, which puts a nice limit on how many games I can include. Maybe 100 games per year, tops. This lets me do a lot faster filtering.
In the last iteration of this thread I replied that I was bored out at work and couldn't find any inspiration/motivation for anything fun. I've since switched gigs (better day rate, and way more interesting & meaningful work) and my brain is slowly kicking into gear again. Have a couple of ideas, the one I think will be the most fun is implementing a custom JVM language. Nothing fancy, just feature rich enough for me to learn what I need to learn in order to implement it.
Photography is a hobby of mine. After putting it off for years, I finally decided to start sharing my photo collection with friends and family.
This resulted in another side project, https://mishmash.photos/ -- a website to organize, share and collaborate on albums (because I always lose photos when going on trips with friends). There are better apps out there for this, but this one is mine.
I made a tiny and open source musical instruments that allows you to make some cool chord progression with a fully configurable synthesis engine. Its still being developed but the website is here [1].
You also have a (quite low quality I'm sorry about that) video demo [2].
For the cool sound it can make, here is a small audio recording [3].
I'm building a camera with zoom / pan / tilt that uses the Raspberry Pi high quality camera and a small telephoto lens I got off of Amazon.
The enclosure for the camera is all 3D printed and made in fusion 360, and I even 3D printed a little box that a cheap joystick fits into that connects to a computer in order to control the position and zoom of the camera over serial.
I live pretty close to an area in San Francisco where you can see massive container ships coming in and out of the bay area, eventually I think it would be cool to have the camera setup somewhere around there so that I could get alerts when ships are entering or leaving the area and watch in real time over a 4G connection to the camera.
1. Summarize Articles – Get concise overviews of content from sources like HackerNews, Reddit, and more.
2. Quick Information Lookup – Effortlessly locate key details on pages such as developer documentation, car forums, and beyond.
3. Personalized LinkedIn Outreach – Craft customized outreach messages for your LinkedIn connections with ease.
4. Review Analysis – Analyze feedback and reviews from platforms like Airbnb, Amazon, and others for quick insights.
I’m curious as to how this differs from Arc’s built in chat with page feature when you press CTRL + F. Using that I can ask questions about the page I’m on.
In a nutshell, reciperium is the center of all my recipes, I was tired of finding recipes on different channels (youtube, reddit, instagram, google, friends, etc), and not having a place to put them. On top of that, I can fork my friend's recipes to adjust them to my taste.
I would actually use this, but I am unsure of it's pricing model and ease of backup. Perhaps I missed it somewhere. Good mobile support on my device.
Two suggestions:
- automatically convert units?, eg IP from Europe assume grams on some setting, convert {Rice}(2 cups) to grams when rendered
- On the timer feature, create a timer (non popup) on the rendered section so I can just one press it to track time for me without changing apps / browser tabs
Thanks for the feedback! Those features are in my roadmap, but I go at a slow rate next to my work. You'll probably see the timer before the unit conversion, as it's actually a hard problem. Did you know there's a US cup and a british cup (actually a few more)?? The problem may involve tracking the origin of the recipe if no lang is provided, or setting some defaults.
On the backup side, the easiest thing I'm introducing soon, is a "raw" button, where you can see the recipe raw, and you can download the `.recp` file. In the future, I'd like to have:
- Export all recipes and favorites
- And in case I give up with the platform: an obsidian integration, or a some kind of desktop app.
So just to be clear, I do want to have an escape hatch, even if the website doesn't succeed, I will still use the language. But, it's not my main priority at the moment.
Regarding the pricing model, I just don't see myself charging for a subscription. I've been thinking how to create a sustainable product. So far, what I have is a potential affiliate program. I want to use the recipe's materials to link to products. I think this is relative nonintrusive, and it's actually useful, because I've found myself reading a recipe and not knowing what something was, like a proofing basket, for example.
The main problem is how I allocate my personal time to add this feature. Is quite some work, and prioritizing people leaving, instead of some other features, doesn't seem good use of my time. I barely have users, and they are all my friends haha
Was tickled when I saw the fork feature. I’ve often thought recipe sites missed that and coming from a software dev background I guess it seems obvious where we’ve got used to forking in git. It was on the roadmap for my stab at a recipe site: https://osomatsu.net
It seems such a shame to forego a literal dinner-fork as an icon for the feature though? :)
Instead of replacing the entire document or selection, we want it to create diffs or operations for the minimal amount of edits as possible. This helps preserve intent better when merging the doc later on with OT/CRDTs. (Of course, you could also ask GPT to semantically merge docs for you haha).
So far, it's been harder than plain text or spreadsheets which have an easier position/coordinate system to work with: just line-col or row-col.
I also have a few screen recordings showing its capabilities. I’ve been using it for about six months to enhance my writing.
The plugin leverages a language model to suggest text improvements, features a split-view interface, and allows users to select the edits they want to keep from a diff.
It’s still a bit rough around the edges, and the code is quite messy since I’m still learning Lua and the Neovim API. However, I’m gradually improving it whenever I find the time.
One insight I’ve gleaned from working on this project is that I’m convinced web dev will trend towards well-designed and modular components with accessible state and mutators.
LLMs will then have a set of these components to dynamically route and build interfaces with.
Component libraries are already popular and more time will be spent inside of them than managing the glue that is outside.
I quit my job to focus on Manabi Reader full-time, for learning Japanese by reading (and next via YouTube). Has its own SRS flashcards or you can use its Anki integration on mobile and desktop.
It tracks every word and kanji you read to show you what you need to learn in order to read something new. It assembles your own personal corpus of example sentences as you read too, and will soon show you "i + 1" sentences to learn. No AI slop, just native immersion.
I'm also finishing an update now that automatically reviews flashcards that appear in texts you read. I find this more enjoyable and effective than slogging through context-light flashcards.
I'm working on a cutting board as a wedding gift. The couple is Irish, and needed some design elements to suit. The edge will be three ribbons of darker wood (walnut, padauk, and walnut again) and the main cutting board area is light (ash).
The hard part is the corners. I'm trying to get some celtic knots going, but this requires extremely accurate sizing, otherwise nothing lines up. The strips of wood are either 3/8" x 1/2" or 1/16" x 1/2". You have to be very careful with clamping when gluing, otherwise everything is off.
Oh and it's end-grain, which just means so much more processing of everything.
We recently soft launched the new https://feetr.io website as well as our stock market AI, and are knocking our pan in to fix the little bugs that have been uncovered in addition to migrating more of our existing code to the new system.
Over the weekend, we trialled the AI on Reddit[0] and got 300 comments more than expected, so we're doing the above while there are a lot more eyeballs on us.
I'm (still) working on my surf forecasting website / PWA [0].
I spent the past few months refactoring most of the site:
* Find a smarter logic to recommend when to go surfing, based on how the combination of swell and wind indicators are.
* Add support for other locations (currently: only Fuerteventura, Canary Islands is there) - this means refactoring the way how forecast data is managed.
* UX & UI: enhance the information hierarchy, menus, create a new visual identity.
I took a unique angle to building a frontend JavaScript framework and I have been pursuing this project for more than half the year now. Like many others before me I was not satisfied with the existing solutions, mostly the shackles to free use of pure JavaScript. My solution has been to create http://github.com/mksunny1/deleight.
Now I am a bit afraid I might have just added a bit too much flexibility in the latest version with the `process` module which truly lets users create and modify 'function-like' objects like regular objects (arrays).
The feature came naturally from trying to solve the problem of creating reactive functions. This really entails building up functions incrementally. Now once I pursued the solution in the logical direction, we have this dangerous thing that is generally considered bad for maintainability.
My goal has always been more simplicity, expressiveness and clarity, which is why I wanted to put everything in the hands of the end user. It is a dilemma.
I launched Screen Recorded (https://screenrecorded.com/en) a few days ago. It's a screen recorder that runs in your browser.
I intentionally made it a super easy choice if you need a quick screen recording by not having any accounts, making it free, not watermarking videos, etc.
I also recently added WebP support to Batch Compress (https://batchcompress.com/en), which is an image compressor that runs in the browser.
nice one.. few 'tests':
- probably menu with save/export is still under development
- in FF when typing quickly - latest 'char' is not displayed, although 'sometimes' is there (and visible when hit <enter> ) ; in Safari behaves correctly; TorBrowser last 'char' not visible/nor there even after <enter>
- when speaking about <enter>ing data - I am used to moving by 'arrows' keys to right/down..
- when speaking about 'jumps' over the blocks - I didn't figure it out at all eg(Ctrl+arrow)
- why repetitive '€' formatting is not doing also unformatting?
- 123 menu is still 'active' after choosing some format (should disappear)
Well well.. classic DEVs - 'I am doing QA for myself..' or even worse: 'There is Jon' - another DEV who's checking after me..
Find proper QA - it's worth - ALWAYS.
Don't forget to incorporate also collaboration feature - and feel free to show that to Proton group - https://proton.me/ - there you can find things you need ;)
I'm working on a Emscripten-ready fork of SFML that brings several key improvements:
- Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten4
- Easy to use drawable batching system
- Enhanced API safety at compile-time
- Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles
- New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices
- Built-in SFML::ImGui module
- Remarkably fast compilation time & small run-time debug mode overhead
I'm working on a timed audio description script for the 1994 science-fiction / adventure film “Stargate” for blind and low-vision audiences.
There are a lot of older films that are not audio described, and so every now and again I pick a film and write a script, and another volunteer records and mixes the narration track.
It takes about 2+ hours to describe about 20 minutes, and the film itself is 2 hours.
Sample:
68
00:11:18,219 --> 00:11:33,169
They step through doors marked "Research Laboratory". The wheel shaped cover stone towers over them, mounted upright on the wall. The disc in the centre has a cartouche, a vertical panel of symbols. Jackson stares up at it open mouthed.
Yes. You can find our version of "Aliens" and "Alien 3" there, along with Audio Introductions (Pre-show audio description) for each, which I highly recommend. Also the TV shows "The Bureau of Magical Things" and "The Secret of Sulphur Springs".
I publish the scripts under a Creative Commons licence so anyone can legally record and mix their own versions if they like. I believe it's possible to run the subtitle files through a braille reader as the film runs for a different experience, but I've never heard of anyone who tried that.
That said, we are experimenting with legal distribution by releasing the timed unmixed narration on Youtube and, in theory, you should be able to sync the narration to a (legally purchased) copy of the film.
Another blind person here, Thanks for doing this!What is the censored URL above?
ah found it, it's a vault of audio if anyone else is curious.
I've had the idea for a while that it should be possible to have an app listen to the movie audio and synchronise the AD track automatically. I think I even heard of such an app but it wasn't open and I haven't heard about it since.
Almost every time I watch something with my family I wish that the AD could be separate so we can listen at a normal volume without the boomy describer's voice which is almost always far too loud.
wow this sounds like a really fun project. These are the kind of projects that excite me honestly. I find it really difficult to get excited about working on projects that are perceived as popular lucrative business ideas.
I'm working on Learntime (https://learntime.ai), an open-source/saas learning app that combines AI mentorship with evidence-based study techniques. It's designed for students and lifelong learners who want to retain information more effectively and perform better in exams.
It focuses on un-prompted recall of entire topics (not just flashcards), supported by an AI mentor that provides hints and tracks progress. It uses spaced repetition to optimise review schedules and includes a quick quiz feature targeting weak areas.
This is my first solo open-source project, and it's been quite a journey! I initially started with LangChain, thinking it would simplify the AI integration. However, I found myself spending more time wrestling with abstractions than solving core problems. Eventually, I dropped it in favour of a more direct approach.
The biggest technical challenge has been implementing free recall scoring with LLMs. I've been through a cycle of different techniques - prompt engineering, few-shot learning, fine-tuning - and back again!
All of this while welcoming my third child and approaching 50! It's been a balancing act, but the project keeps me energised. Feedback, similar experiences or insights welcome!
I've been diving head-first into raw, nerdy, mathy concurrency theory.
Something fun about being into niche subjects in computer science is that the textbooks for them have very low resale value. As a result, you can make "best offers" on eBay for 1/2 or even less than the suggested price, and it will likely be accepted since the seller really just wants to get rid of them.
I've been taking advantage of this and purchased a bunch of obscure concurrency theory books that I've been reading through.
Reverse engineering my e-bike’s head unit and motor controller to build a custom head unit out of a Raspberry Pi with oled touch screen (head unit will also be used to control LED patterns on the bike).
Used a logic analyzer to work out the protocol between the head unit and the motor controller (uart at 9600) and used a ESP32 to man in the middle the protocol. Currently reverse engineering the meaning of the bytes in the packets sent between the units.
First attempt was taking apart the head unit and attaching a debugger to the exposed serial debug interface (Cortex M0) chip, but looks like the manufacturer had disabled flash reading by setting the flash security bit.
Don't know the exact motor (Have yet to pull the back wheel off and inspect) but the motor controller is a Dongguan Jing Hui Brushless DC motor controller. The controller "head unit" is a Tian jin Yolin YL90T-H.
I am working on "Subscription Manager," a simple single-page web application that allows users to manage their recurring payments. It provides a summary of your expenses, including weekly, monthly, and yearly totals for all your current subscriptions. Additionally, it features notifications through NTFY to notify when a subscription is dued for payment.
I'm almost finished my modular MIDI Controller software for iOS/iPadOS. I am hoping to offer a good compromise between ease of setup and power. Hopefully I get this is on testflight in about a week or two. Best I can share is some screenshots right now: https://imgur.com/a/s80g0Iv
Really hoping to do this right as an indie dev with a good website, video promotion, marketing, etc. Probably free but with a one-time IAP for unlocking features. Worst case scenario this helps me land new jobs :p
I'm extending Postgres with the GraphBLAS/SparseBLAS APIs for sparse and dense linear algebra operations directly in SQL with OneSparse. Like JSON/JSONB did for unstructured data, OneSparse does for matrices, vectors and linear algebra optimized with the SuiteSparse JIT compiler to target dense and sparse kernels for CPUs and GPUs.
Building an AI negotiation tool for B2B purchasing [0]. It automates the interactions with potential suppliers and summarises the best bid submissions.
Currently struggling with how to get any sales but there are some good resources like Aaron's cold outreach video [1]
Because there’s finally an image generation that can do people with hands, I’m returning to my project for a day in life screensaver. Me and my wife will add notes to the calendar with what happened today. I will pull maybe some images from my photo library and ask llm to describe them. Then I will feed this into flux and create an image. And then I will put the image into Apple photo library to show on my Apple TV.
I tried this manually and it was a blast with my kids. They’ll love it.
We are working on launching SocialiQ 2.0 [0] — a tool designed to help marketers find, qualify, and curate influencers without ever leaving social media.
This journey started with a simple idea: to challenge the belief that social media research is slow and ineffective. We felt the same pain and decided to build a larger influencer database, like other platforms out there. But we quickly realized something interesting—our users prefer spending time directly on social media rather than bouncing between a SaaS platform. So we went back to the drawing board to rethink how we could truly make this experience better.
With SocialiQ 2.0 We’ve made it possible to qualify influencers directly within social media, cutting out the hassle. On October 8th, we’re launching a version that’s not only smarter but also faster and easier to use. Over 20,000 marketers already love SocialiQ, but this update is going to take things to the next level.
We can’t wait to show you what’s next. If you want early access, join the waitlist on Product Hunt [1].
I want to create my first PCB in the upcoming month.
Some months ago, I've build a digital clock, based on the somewhat famous 8x8 LED matrix modules and a 3D-printed enclosure.
While doing everything on a breadboard was fine for a quantity of 1, I thought about building some more and gifting them to friends. For that, a custom PCB to place the ESP on, and screw it into the housing would be nice.
So... I'll need to learn to create a simple PCB with KiCad and then have it produced with one of the online services.
I'm working on a web app that helps you discover new things to read, watch, listen to and play.
You start with either an example or a brief description. Then, you'll get relevant preferences to select from. Your recommendations are based on the preferences you select. Every run is different.
I've added some new features along with support for blogs/newsletters and podcasts over the past month, and improved the recommendations generally.
Working on The Road to Next [0] as a video course to teach developers about full-stack development. It's in great shape, but I am still waiting for the official release of React 19 and Next 15. Not an easy task though, because some APIs are still changing (e.g. Next APIs becoming async in Next 15).
But in any way, I think it will be a great resource for developers to level up :)
That's pretty awesome, wasn't expecting typescript support too, and thought it would just be bound to the Unity/C# API but you've added support for rendering modern React into Unity as well.
Tyty! To be honest, Godot and UE have been very tempting. I'm just too deep into Unity at this point. Even I'm surprised that their years of fiascos didn't shake me off. But it looks like things are getting better over there.
Anyone know of a community where you genuinely try each other’s stuff and give feedback? Sometimes lose motivation aimlessly guessing what people want without having users to give actual feedback.
This would be nice. I gave up on trying to do things externally a long time ago. I get wildly demotivated and deeply believe all I ever do is waste people's time and irritate them.
I'm working on PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com), a web app to predict salaries from Linkedin CVs and job opportunities.
There are also adjacent services, like AI career coach that can roast your CV and give advice on how to raise your salary, and crowdsourced salaries data.
I'm working on other features like creating interview questions based on CVs, and so on.
- Import/export (specifically from Japan to the US): In particular, importing kei vehicles >25 years old as well as specialty roasted coffee. Both of which have a lot of specific regulations and intricacy, and while I've done a lot of reading on how to do them (e.g. this doc on importing a kei truck: https://wittymelon.wordpress.com/portfolio/diy-how-to-import...). If anyone has connections to people who have imported kei vehicles to the US, I'd love to chat!
iOS game to learn rhythm and drums [0]. It's MIDI based. Midi files to use as the tracks to practice on and Midi controllers to use as input. Here's a demo with my son on electronic drums [1]
I am working on Zipshot. http://zipshot.co -- The goal is to make the best free screenshot & OCR app for mac.
This is my side project because I needed an app like this for my daily use and I hate the fact that every other good app is paid even though maintaining such an app really doesn't cost anything.
Zipshot solves several problems:
- Easy to use shortcuts like cmd+shift+1
- No desktop clutter as images are uploaded to Zipshot cloud.
- Share via links.
- Powerful editor and figma style comments for annotations.
- OCR that works without the internet on 11 languages.
- Slack & Gmail integration.
- Context aware naming.
- Serious privacy measures.
- One click data download.
Who is it for:
- Users who take 5+ screenshots a week with mostly the purpose of sharing it with their team or friends.
I am improving it every week. Here are the things I am working on:
- Make the on-boarding and permission seeking workflow simpler.
- Speed up the app for apple silicon devices.
- Support OCR for rotated text and include more languages.
I am working a contract job to integrate some banking back office concerns (pays bills), a Unity RTS game and a machine learning project.
The ML project is probably the most interesting. It is seeking to use evolutionary/genetic algorithms with novel computational substrates such as spiking networks and Turing machines. Things that would (by intent) run poorly on someone's GPU farm. I figure I might get lucky looking under rocks no one seems to care about anymore.
Been working on issue 2 for Forest Friends Zine. The first issue was on system evals, and it was well received. I also learned a lot about how these RAG systems are built. The second issue will either be about UI to gather user feedback or tool use.
I have made 2 batches of fermented pepper sauce already this year and going for a third today. I include onions, carrots and garlic in the ferment. Getting great feedback on it.
Here is my chilis (because they are awesome and I'm really proud of them): https://ibb.co/8czYf6R
Lots of people have visited but a launch on HN isn’t enough on its own. I’m trying to figure out how to get the word out to more people to kickstart it. The goal is for it to be a community that people return to as part of their daily online life. That’s not a programming problem so it’s hard (for me).
Still quite a bit of work to do but I wanted something that could be a one-stop shop for all kinds of 2D games. So you could use it to make something as varied as say UFO 50 [0] or any of the arcade games from the 1980s-90s.
I've always thought there should be more genre-specific "editors" instead of just "engines". Because even with the most powerful engines you still need a TON of boilerplate and Google-fu to make all the basic mid-layer stuff that’s necessary in almost all games.
The editors and toolkits that came with StarCraft, Warcraft 3 etc. enabled solitary creators to make some of the most popular games in the world like DotA, CounterStrike, even spawning entire new genres..
And I’ve always loved the “composition” paradigm: A workflow where you’d think about the basic behaviors that your in-game objects and characters will have, write them once, and then wire them together in many different ways.
And Godot has been the perfect starting place for that! Its editor is good enough and customizable, and its node hierarchy system fits perfectly with the idea of Lego-like components. I wanted to make something like Godot Nodes but for gameplay.
Hopefully soon I will have my ideal engine to actually make my actual game… :’)
1. After the recent successful growth of Antithesis [1], I'm diving into the topic of deterministic simulation testing. There are some cases (and ready-to-use libraries) where people are doing this in Rust, C++, Go, I'm interesting in this in Java. So I'm up to some experiments. I've also started an "awesome list" of resources about this topic [2]
2. I've made a generated serialization/deserialization library for the Kafka wire protocol in Rust, tested against the original Java implementation. I'll add 3.9 support once it's released and don't see much upcoming changes to the library, apart from maybe working on the Go version.
On writing some blog posts about things I’ve built lately (both at work and in my own time). Helps a lot with diving more deeply into topics than what’s reasonable for a “just needs to work” implementation.
I'm working on a new product, Datagram, which makes it easy for developers to share metrics using an API and mobile app.
I've found that it's difficult to distribute metrics inside an organization. Today, most teams rely on systems like PowerBI / Tableau which are great for deep analysis, but can be too complex for sharing headline data to a large audience. Or, even more challenging, data can be locked in spreadsheets that are difficult to access when all you want to know is a few simple metrics like revenue or customer growth.
With Datagram, developers can quickly create data dashboards, update them via API, and push updates to the whole team on mobile using notifications.
Has anyone experienced similar challenges and does this sound interesting? It would be great to hear any feedback as we're early stage and want to make sure we're building something people want!
I'm working on an extension to the Modify in blocks Model Synthesis algorithm [0] and the Wave Function Collapse algorithm [1] called "Punch Out Model Synthesis":
The idea is you take an example image, chop it into little segments and infer tile rules depending on the overlap. It's very much old fashioned "machine learning/artificial intelligence" (that is, without any neural networks involved). There's also a demo of tile rule inference idea here:
We are building Tribe - an AI-concierge for expert services. In India, finding expert service professionals for services like - photographers, cake-makers, fitness trainers, and more - is difficult and frustrating.
A typical user journey involves hustling through Instagram, Google, or word-of-mouth to find the right experts. And then they have to talk to multiple expert providers to align on scope, negotiate the price, and hope the service quality matches their expectations. It’s painful and full of friction right?
With Tribe, we aim to transform this user journey from a chore into a delightful experience. Think of it like closest one can get to an “Amazon for services”.
I am working on blog posts about various topics, vanilla intersection loading, accessible web components, server-side rendering strategies, vanilla PWA, etc…
- Major house renovation. Air sourced heat pumps are in, but the kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom are WIP. Subfloor, insulation, and drywall are the current focus. Also replumbing domestic cold and hot water in the entire house. Adding a brand new backup condensing gas hydronic system for when it's too cold for the heat pumps.
- Building a rear bumper for my 80 series Land Cruiser (4x4 Labs DIY kit).
- Building a press brake for my 20 ton shop press to bend some brackets to mount a backhoe to my tractor.
- Rustproofing both cars (80 series and diesel W210 Benz) before winter. Rust reformer primer, POR-15, and various Noxudol waxes and some Blaster Shield. New front and rear bumpers for the W210, painting front and (new) rear bumper on the 80.
- Working on something I'm tentatively calling "Swage" which is all about compact (think: nearly the information-theoretic minimum number of bits) representation for o11y data (metrics, traces, logs).
- Refactoring a PID controller crate I wrote a while back to be less bad and more good (in particular, trying to use funty to make it generic over fixed and floating point numbers).
I am working on my text course about Deno (https://niklasmtj.de/deno/course/). With Deno 2.0 just right around the corner, I'm excited to get this course into the hands of possible new users. I really like how Deno does a lot of things better than Node. With a toolchain similiar to other modern language enviroments (e.g. Golang) it helps a lot not thinking about "What might be the hot package to use right now".
Right now I have 3/7 chapters ready and I am working on the 4th right now. It will be about Deno on the CLI, learning about the permission model, getting user input etc. creating a small CLI application as a single file binary (deno compile)
After abandoning a lot of smaller side projects for years now I wanted to push through and ship something that is not just some hours of work (read <3-4 hours). I learnt that I have a lot of fun writing about and trying to teach things that I'm interested in.
Dance calendar (Django app, with some AlpineJS/HTMX). Approximately 80 admin pages + 20 end user views + 100 admin views. 2M page loads/month during the summertime. This is in production.
For the dance calendar, support site with good first-line AI support based on FAQ answers.
Ad management platform for the dance calendar. Sites like this have specific requirements for placing ads that are not well supported by AdSense etc. I would like to have an alternative for smaller players for the header bidding used by the larger players.
Separate webapp to store happenings (messages, emails, descriptions, documents, etc.), tag them and show them on a timeline, allowing filtering the events visible on the timeline. Django/HTMX/AlpineJS. This is for a legal battle I am having.
A tool for describing workflows using the Unified Service Management (USM) model. The method is to frameworks (ITIL etc.) what open source is to commercial software. I am currently working on cross-referencing tool to map ISO 27k requirements to USM statements. I have developed my own formal language for defining the requirements. The end goal is to automate validating many ISO 27k requirements.
Currently finishing up the tournament software and getting ready for beta testing with some local clubs. This should eventually allow frugal clubs to operate golf tournaments extremely cheaply because no data needs to be licensed if they add their own course's data to the wiki.
Didn't try yet - however did you consider ppl are working / having meetings / etc - simply don't want to see anything on their screen they don't expect? What about proper notification & maybe 'blinking' icon in appropriate area? Setting could contain even sound and/or small menu appears similar to Battery status..
Working on a managed Kubernetes service that allows you to bring your own worker nodes. Spin up a control plane in your region of choice and build a K8s cluster using whatever—VMs, bare metal, or heck, even your Raspberry Pis at home.
Just a fun little CRUD app built with Next.js, MUI, Prisma Postgres. I'm adding Halloween sketches now, if you know some good ones feel free to add them, or anything else :)
I have built a news and public holidays tracker at
httsp://alarms.global. It focuses on what happened and natural disasters so that
you can know what's going on.
I’m solidly reinventing the wheel by building my own cut-down version of Ghost, cut with a minimal platform such as Blot, Bear, Mataroa, etc; using classless HTML as the source (rather than mobiledoc).
Aim is for a static-site development/writing experience but with a dynamic app to allow for email subscriptions, payments, etc.
Not building it as a business, just to meet my own needs.
I'm working on my notes app Chronicles[1] again. Typical wysiwyg over local markdown files app. After a lot of internal debate, I've decided I don't want to have novels under my desk and am committing to finishing a 1.0[2] of it. Its a few releases from being accessible to new users, but for me its already displaced most of my other note taking tools. Not nearly as cool as half the stuff on this page, or half my other ideas. But its something I like, and something I can finish.
Working on a Run N Gun for the Wonderswan Color. Starting making "retro" games about 3 years ago and have been really loving it.
After successfully completing my first game, Strife Sisters - a strategy RPG, I decided to try out a new genre. Although I'm having fun working on this style of game, part of me wishes I had stuck with the same genre since I still had a lot of ideas to work with.
I have a soft spot for obscure gaming consoles (couldnt tell you why). So, after I made my PC Engine game, I kind of landed on either Wonderswan or PCFX and the Wonderswan had a really awesome tool chain made for it recently* whereas the PCFX still has some way to go for development.
Working on an API product based on good old visual classifiers to detect Malaria in real world blood samples.
I know there are lots of publications claiming they have solved this problem, but there is no real world solution that actually works like a product you can plug your microscope to.
Have a big client ready to pay.
A basic CRUD app around goal setting as a test for how AI tools can help write web apps to see how a modern web team could leverage this stuff to go faster, and maybe identify some missing pieces I could build one day. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Copilot etc are genuinely great if you can already write code. They really let you blast straight through the mundane bits and focus on the hard stuff.
I'm currently trying to implement an in-editor sandboxing/modding solution for the Godot game engine. It's hard work trying to make everything work the way people are used to having it, and even competing with GDScript.
I am working on a multiplayer spell-based shooter game using BabylonJS and Clojure. It's a browser game; if anyone is interested, here is the demo link: https://wizardmasters.io
It's in the prototype phase, and I was heavily inspired by the game Spellbreak.
Trying to figure out is there a way for specialized data generate / preperation for agents within an organization.
Most of the startups are unable to document things properly because of the nature of business and speed. But everything is available in conversations over emails / slack and calls.
Can we prepare a brain like graph which is context aware and understands the business and product?
im building uxie: a pdf reader app with note taking, annotations, collaboration, ai features (chat, flashcards generation w. ai-feedbacks), tts, ocr,etc
promise this isn't just one of those chatwithpdf clones. its fully open source and free, and constantly shipping. (built a line-by-line highlighting tts just today https://x.com/vishnuu122/status/1840509664876020154)
more features coming soon.
would love for y'all to try it out and give feedbacks :)
I'm currently working on a new blockchain technology called Roughchain. Earlier today, I shared the whitepaper in this HN thread [1], and I’ve already received some valuable feedback.
The core architecture is split into two components: a timestamping signing service and a P2P gossip network. By decoupling the gossip network, I'm simulating its performance using a Monte Carlo approach. With a basic gossip protocol, the simulation reaches ~10k TPS on a 100-node, randomly connected network (not fully connected), and I see a lot of potential for further protocol optimizations.
Initially, I considered a more resource-intensive approach using Shadow [2] for more realistic node simulations, as outlined in this discussion on libp2p's Gossipsub stress metrics [3]. However, the Monte Carlo method allows me to simulate the network more efficiently without needing to deploy full nodes.
In parallel, I'm exploring game-theoretical concepts for selecting signers and ensuring the system remains open to new entrants. One paper I'm currently diving into is "Collusion, Efficiency, and Dominant Strategies" [4].
I'm developing a tool called Sheetany that allows people to easily convert Google Sheets into websites.
Sheetany is a website builder that helps you quickly create websites directly from your Google Sheets without design or development skills, for blogs, directories, job boards, and more.
Its a hobby project, to play around with American Football statistics.
I'm trying to do a few innovative things with it. e.g. I generate an excitement-rating per-game.
Here are the excitement ratings from yesterday's games:
I've really gone hard into 3D printing over the last 3 months. I dabbled with it the last 5 years, but on Father's Day this year I got a Bambu P1S with AMS and can do 4 different filaments. Total game changer, nearly "fire and forget", and the multi-color has been a lot of fun. Most recently I figured out how to design multi-color objects out of logos, and have printed coasters for my work logo, my SIL's work logo, etc. Learning Plasticity or another CAD as an alternative to TinkerCAD which is what I've used so far.
It's been a lot of fun, and my wife has sold a few things out of it on her Etsy shop. I've had the printer running nearly continuously since I got it, including a few weeks where I was printing parts for a circular sock knitting machine for someone local who reached out through a Facebook gifting community.
I specialize in building templates and component libraries. I’ve recently launched https://www.shadcnblocks.com which is a set of 200+ block components for Shadcn UI. The recent growth in popularity of Shadcn UI is extraordinary.
I’m also reworking and relaunched https://www.wickedblocks.dev which has nearly 200 free blocks for Tailwind. We’ll be released some optional premium sets here soon.
Finally we are about to release a set of 3 templates for 11ty at https://www.zerostatic.io where I build niche templates for SSGs. I believe these will be some of the best template available for 11ty and I’m keen to see if this niche has a serviceable market.
Are you an IRC shitposter? Isn't it hard to experiment with Toilet/Figlet fonts and flags? Well _not anymore._ Presenting Tuilet: a front-end to Toilet written by us, for us.
An app to track your groceries, to save money and eat healthy.
I think healthiest food is cooked at home and people are eating out and doing takeaways . So I am planning to build tools and features which help people to cook more at home.
I am working on InvitePlus.io, a tool to manage user access and help companies in onboarding. It will send invites to all software your team has been using with just an email. You can manage teams across multiple platforms (Github, Jira, Asana, etc). Also, you can revoke access with a single click.
I just relaunched PostalAgent which lets you send postcards online by circling neighborhoods on a google map and then refining using demographic filters
My free plan offers an all in price which includes design, print and mail to your customers door for less than any competitor
I’m scraping a list of every single UK company that has raised funding in the last 3 years - with details of how much and when - after finding out the info is available but hidden in certain filings on the Companies House website. Let me know if you’d like a copy for free - should be done in the next week or two!
It’s on the forms SH01 for new share allotments. Then look for the number allotted and the amount paid (per share), and the total funding is the number allotted multiplied by the amount paid
I’m working on http://100daysofcode.io - a comprehensive 100-day roadmap for individuals eager to dive into programming. My goal is to make the journey of learning to code more structured. Love to hear your feedback on the idea.
Writing some fiction that I’ve wanted to get to for years. Releasing a chapter at a time.
Trying to decide on My Next Big Technology Project. I might have already decided, but I’m not ready to share for psychological reasons. I would like to do it in the open, but I have no idea how to build an audience. Maybe I just get started and hope I'm not totally boring.
Definitely just get started and see how it goes. Maybe also start with a "Sign up to get notified when we launch" form on your website, to generate some interest and start building a mailing list.
To fit on a trailer (the mushroom's cap is 11.5ft wide) the cap comes off the stem and the edges of the cap are two half-moons which have fixed mounting points where threaded rod sticks through some welded washers, and a nut is put on in place. I was too last minute to install the 200 WS2811 pixels and have them run some cool patterns, before the music festival I brought it to came time, but even just a lantern on top (another painters tarp covered the cap's metal-frame, and everything was spray painted) looked great.
Super fun project. Expensive, but I learned a lot, got to be creative, and I'm happy to try out new things and make the best of my before-children time. Also, it was such a joy seeing people croud around the mushroom (and site beside the mushroom man inside) at night during the festival.
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